An experiment was carried out which was aimed at testing the hypothesis that, in English, prominence on a predicate contains no information about the "given-new" status of that predicate if it is followed by a (lexical) object that carries a sentence accent. The results are taken to lend support to a view of English prosody whereby (a) prosodic structure is not (fully) predictable from syntactic structure, and (b) the relation between "new"-ness and a sentence accent is indirect.
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Carlos Gussenhoven (1983) studied this question.
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