This paper reports on a web-based experiment to investigate the perception of prominence in words with different focus structures in Italian. In the experiment, native listeners of the Bari variety of Italian, and German learners of Italian, rated the perceived prominence of object nouns in broad and narrow focus and post-focally using a visual analogue scale. Although both groups of listeners rated words in narrow focus as higher in prominence than words in broad focus, there were differences between the two groups in rating post-focal words. While German learners rated post-focal words as less prominent than those in broad focus, native Italian listeners perceived words in both of these conditions as equally prominent. The Italian ratings are particularly striking, as post-focal words had flat pitch and were weaker in terms of periodic energy mass than words in broad focus, leading to the conclusion that the native listeners were rating the words by taking their knowledge of the prosodic system of Italian into account. Our results confirm phonological accounts of Italian as having post-focal accents, even when the pitch is flat.

This paper investigates the reason why aggressively non-D-linked items such as wh-the-hell (WTH) are allowed in swiping, but not in sluicing. Investigating the potential syntactic, semantic and prosodic licensors of WTH in sluicing and swiping in the British English variety, we conclude that syntactic or semantic constraints cannot be the source of the difference. Instead, we propose a novel prosodic account in which the WTH must satisfy the prosodic licensing condition that it cannot bear nuclear accent. We show that this is satisfied in swiping, but not in sluicing contexts. On the basis of the novel findings of an acceptability rating study of swiping, which reveal that both ‘given’ and ‘new’ prepositions are equally acceptable for British English speakers, we argue that the preposition is accentuated in this elliptical construction because it is structurally the deepest element. The licensing condition on WTHs in sluicing and swiping is therefore not mediated directly by the conditions on ellipsis, but by the particular prosodic distribution that a WTH happens to have in sluicing and swiping. We extend the account to similar constructions in Dutch.