How to Operate Over Alternatives: The Place of the L*+H Pitch Accent Among Possible Focus Meanings

This paper presents three auditory rating experiments investigating the meaning contribution of the L*+H pitch accent. Adapting previous work, we hypothesize L*+H to contribute an evaluative scale. The first experiment tests this hypothesis by drawing a connection to the ambiguity of epistemic and concessive at least, based on the intuition that its concessive interpretation correlates with a L*+H accent. The data corroborate this intuition by showing that an L*H accent receives lower ratings than an H* accent in contexts that are more compatible with an epistemic interpretation of at least. The second experiment extends this pattern to the contribution of L*+H in the same contexts but without at least, with L*+H receiving higher ratings than the H* accent in concessive contexts. The final experiment tested whether the contribution of L*+H can be considered equivalent to concessive at least, ultimately providing evidence against such an equivalence and in favor of a broader range of meaning of the accent. The paper concludes with a discussion of where the identified contribution of L*+H fits into the grammatical repertoire of Focusoperators and its relation to psycholinguistic work on Focus.