NANCY HEDBERG AND JUAN M. SOSA THE PROSODY OF TOPIC AND FOCUS IN SPONTANEOUS ENGLISH DIALOGUE * Abstract. This paper addresses the putative prosodic contrast between topic and focus and the tonal phonology underlying such information structure phenomena. We show that while there are systematic correlations between intonation and information structure categories, these correlations are not as straightforward as is suggested in the literature. In particular we deny that there is any prosodic category as distinctive as a ‘topic accent’ as opposed to a ‘focus accent’ in English. We innovate in this study by basing our investigation on naturally occurring spontaneous speech instead of on constructed examples or on experimentally-induced speech. 1. INTRODUCTION Our research addresses the interface between meaning and prosody. In particular, it concerns the way intonation plays a part in the interpretation of an utterance. For example, we are concerned with the extent to which a falling versus a falling-rising intonation at the end of an utterance or an extra tonal height on a specific word or phrase affects the way the utterance is interpreted. Information structure categories such as topic and focus have been correlated with specific types of contours. Many authors have stated that there is a peak associated with focus, while others have stated that there is also a peak associated with topic. Claims have been made as to the specific sequence of underlying tones associated with these categories, at least for constructed examples; for instance, that focus will be marked with H* and topic will be marked with L+H*. Here, we test these claims by analyzing the intonation and information structure of a sample of spontaneous dialogue in English. 2. DATA The data were taken from six half-hour episodes of the PBS political discussion television show, The McLaughlin Group, videotaped in April and May 2001. The host, John McLaughlin, discusses current issues of the day with four journalist guests. The journalists have widely differing political beliefs and therefore the discussions get heated and the speakers produce speech that we believe to be quite spontaneous. The guests vary somewhat from week to week. Each half-hour episode consists of four issues discussed. For the first five episodes, we selected the first issue because it was the longest. For the sixth episode, we analyzed a combination of issue two and three. Each issue is introduced by John McLaughlin in a monologue. We didn’t analyze these portions of the videotapes. All participants are native speakers of American English. An advantage to analyzing the McLaughlin Group as a source of data is that transcripts of the sessions are available on the World-Wide Web. In the few cases where we found discrepancies between the transcript and the videotape in the portions of the transcript we were analyzing, we corrected the transcript.