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Two competing models attempt to explain the deaccentuation of antecedent nonidentical discourse-inferable material (e.g., Bach wrote many pieces for viola. He must have LOVED string instruments). One uses a single grammatical constraint to license deaccenting for identical and nonidentical material. The second licenses deaccenting grammatically only for identical constituents, whereas deaccented nonidentical material requires accommodation of an alternative antecedent. In three experiments, we tested listeners’ preferences for accentuation or deaccentuation on nonidentical inferable material in out-of-the-blue contexts, supportive discourse contexts, and in the presence of the presupposition trigger too. The results indicate that listeners by default prefer for inferable material to be accented, but that this preference can be mitigated or even reversed with the help of manipulations in the broader discourse context. By contrast, listeners reliably preferred for repeated material to be deaccented. We argue that these results are more compatible with the accommodation model of deaccenting licensing, which allows for differential licensing of deaccentuation on inferable versus repeated constituents and provides a principled account of the sensitivity of accentuation preferences on inferable material to broader contextual manipulations. 

A central question of language comprehension concerns the interaction between linguistic form and broader representations of discourse in the interpretation of context-sensitive expressions. This interaction is instantiated in the interpretation of verb phrase ellipsis, where previous work has shown that the linguistic antecedent and the broader context are both considered in resolution. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we investigated VPE interpretation in discourses where the antecedent and the broader context make different information available for inclusion in the interpretation of the ellipsis site. Our results point to a complex interaction between linguistic antecedents and the broader discourse context in interpretation, putting considerable constraints on the set of possible models for VPE resolution. This work contributes to a better understanding of both the connections between and the boundaries separating linguistic structure and mental models of discourse contexts. 

The claim that deaccenting of a constituent can be licensed by an entailment or bridging relation in addition to overt instantiation in the prior discourse context has generally not been the subject of rigorous empirical investigation. In a production study, participants read verbs that were new to the discourse, overtly instantiated in an antecedent, or made available via entailment or a bridging inference. Analysis of f0, intensity, duration, and naive judgments of prominence largely failed to detect evidence that verbs made available by inferencing relations were pronounced with less prominence than those that were new to the discourse, whereas verbs that were overtly instantiated in the prior discourse were reliably deaccented. The results call into question the claim that deaccenting can be licensed by inferencing relations and motivate further study of deaccenting under non-identity.