In this paper, a minimalist phase-based articulation will be given to the claim that the relation between contrastive focus and phonetics is indirect, mediated by a phonological representation of local phrase stress prominence (as advocated by Truckenbrodt 1995, 2005, Rooth 1996b, Ladd 1996, Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006, Selkirk 2006).

Within a minimalist phase-based framework, the contrastive focus-prosodic stress prominence relation can be construed as the morphological Spell-Out of the morphosyntactic F-marking for contrastive/ alternatives focus that is standardly assumed in the syntactic and semantics literature on contrastive focus. (cf. Féry, Fanselow and Krifka, eds. 2007). The phonetic prominence properties associated with contrastive focus constituents, e.g. extra duration of focus in English, pitch protrusion of focus and post-focus compression in English and Japanese, can be understood as results of a post-Spell-Out surface phonetic interpretation of the phonological stress prominence assigned to focus during Spell-Out.

Arguments are presented from English in favor of a phonological stress prominence representation for contrastive focus—including the systematic appearance of focused function words in their phonologically stressed strong forms and the necessary presence of predictable pitch accenting on contrastive focus, arguably the result of phonological constraints on the stress-tone relation. And a theory of stress-sensitivity in phonetic interpretation is sketched out.

Turning to Japanese, a case is made against the proposal by Ishihara 2003, 2005 that the phonetic properties of sentences containing contrastive focus, specifically wh-questions, are the result of phasal phonetic Spell-Out which directly interprets contrastive focus F-marking as F0 prominence and following F0 compression. It shown---based on data from Hirotani 2005, in addition to the data reported in Deguchi and Kitagawa 2002, Ishihara 2003, 2005, and Kitagawa 2005 on the prosody of embedded wh-questions with different scopes-- that an indirect, phonological representation-based approach to the phonetic interpretation of the contrastive focus of wh-questions and their scope provides a superior account of the full range of data concerning the phonetics of contrastive focus sentences.