In a production experiment and two follow-up perception experiments on read German we investigated the (de-)coding of discourse-new, inferentially and textually accessible and given discourse referents by prosodic means. Results reveal that a decrease in the referent’s level of givenness is reflected by an increase in its prosodic prominence (expressed by differences in the status and type of accent used) providing evidence for the relevance of different intermediate types of information status between the poles given and new. Furthermore, perception data indicate that the degree of prosodic prominence can serve as the decisive cue for decoding a referent’s level of givenness.