The prosody of focus and emphasis in Sepedi

Sepedi (Southern Bantu, S30) does not have grammaticalized focus prosody due to which focused constituents are unambiguously marked by prosodic prominence in one way or another. Nevertheless, prosodic traces of emphasis might still exist. The paper reports on a study that investigates acoustic traces of emphasis in Sepedi and their role for processing. An auditory analysis of sentences uttered in different focus contexts reveals a number of acoustic cues occurring in different focus structures. However, the cues are not consistently present and therefore raise the question as to their relevance for semantic interpretation. Results from a phoneme-detection study are used to investigate the role of these acoustic cues for processing.