Correlates of prosodic phrasing are examined in a comparative study between two languages, German and French. The material was elicited in a production experiment with 30 speakers of German and 20 speakers of French, who were asked to describe orally the spatial arrangement of toy animals on a table. Prosodic phrasing clearly correlates to syntactic structure in both languages, but tonal excursions correspond to pitch accents plus boundaries in German, and have a demarcative function in French. This difference is explained by the presence vs. absence of lexical stresses in the two languages. It is reflected in the position of tones, which are peripheral in the French prosodic phrases, but are associated with metrical heads in German, and also with final lengthening, which is systematic in French, but not in German. A final difference between the two languages is deaccenting, used in German, but not in French.

Ladd (1988) investigates configurations A[BC]vs.[AB]C of three English clauses containing clause-internal downstep. A sister-node relation between clauses (but not a sequential relation) leads to downstep among clauses, such that C is systematically lower than B in A[BC] but not in [AB]C. These findings are replicated here with German data. In addition, the German phenomenon of upstep (Truckenbrodt 2007b) arguably targets the phonetic reference line that models lowering among clauses (van den Berget al.1992). We show that both Ladd's and our results also support Selkirk's (2011) suggestion that root sentences/illocutionary clauses can be interpreted as matched to intonational phrases (not just aligned with them, as in Downing 1970). The results also suggest that, in addition to downstep among intonational phrases, phrase-final lowering takes place.