The role of speaker beliefs in determining accent placement

In English and other languages, the distribution of nuclear pitch accents within a sentence usually reflects how the meaningful parts of the sentence relate to the context. Generally speaking, the nuclear pitch accent can only occur felicitously on focused parts of the sentence, corresponding to information that is not contextually retrievable or given. In most contemporary theories, focus is formally represented by an abstract syntactic feature ‘F’. Those parts of the sentence that are given tend to resist F-marking and thus nuclear accentuation. In short, there is a more or less tight coupling between (i) the contextual information status of parts of the sentence; (ii) the focus structure of the sentence (represented by the distribution of syntactic F-marking); and (iii) the actual accent placement in the phonological form.