Stressed versus unstressed usage of the demonstrative pronoun "ten" in reference to relative clauses
Abstract
The study deals with the question of stress-based prominence assigned in certain context to the Czech demonstrative pronoun 'ten' (meaning roughly 'this' or 'that' or even 'the'). While the default production of the pronoun is without the stress, there are certain semantically defined situations in which stressed form of the pronoun seems more appropriate.
The analysis of such situations together with a speech production experiment were carried out to form and possibly support hypotheses about the use of the stressed form. The results suggest that natives speakers of Czech posses the sensitivity to differentiate between 'classifying' and 'discerning' contexts and manifest it relatively consistently in their speech by assigning prosodic salience to the demonstrative pronoun 'ten' together with deaccenting the first syllable of the following noun.