Speakers may use pitch accents as pointers to new information, or as signals of a contrast
relation between the accented item and a limited set of alternatives. There is no consensus
in the literature whether a separately identifiable contrastive accent exists. Some studies
report that contrastive accents are more emphatic than newness accents and have a
different melodic shape. In other studies, however, it is maintained that contrastiveness can
only be determined by looking at how accents are distributed in an utterance. It is argued …