Inter-speaker variation, Optimality theory, and the prosody of clitic left-dislocations in Spanish

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study on the prosody of clitic left-dislocations (CLLDs) in Spanish and offers new perspectives on how the phenomenon of inter-speaker variation in linguistic data can be integrated into formal grammatical theory. Results from a production experiment based on scripted speech show that CLLDs have an obligatory left and right boundary (typically a high edge tone at the intermediate phrase level), while other sentence-internal boundaries are subject to inter-speaker variation. The hypothesis presented here suggests that prosodic boundaries which mark information structural (IS) categories are more necessary than boundaries which satisfy alignment constraints; only the latter can show inter-speaker variation (

Big accents in Stockholm Swedish: Nuclear accents, prenuclear accents, and initiality accents

“…The big accent has often been referred to as a focus accent, as it appears on focus with very few exceptions. 2 However, by now, it is clear that there is no one-to-one correspondence between information-structural focus and big accents (Myrberg 2010;Myrberg & Riad 2015;2016). Big accents regularly occur on given material, and focused material can contain more than one big accent (as will be shown in this study).…”

“…Nuclear accents are heads of ι (the rightmost big accent in ι), and have a similar distribution in Swedish to that described for West Germanic languages like English, German and Dutch (Pierrehumbert 1980;Selkirk 1984;Féry 1993;Selkirk 1995;Gussenhoven 2004;Féry & Samek-Lodovici 2006;Ladd 2008). As in other Germanic languages, information-structural foci obligatorily contain the nuclear accent, which is the rightmost and strongest prominence in Swedish sentences (Myrberg 2010;Myrberg & Riad 2015;2016). 7 In Swedish, like in other Germanic languages, the requirement that a focus must contain the nuclear accent results in a ban on strong prominences in the postfocal area (e.g., Selkirk 1984;Ladd 2008;Féry 2013).…”

“…These constraints govern the relation between prosodic and syntactic edges, while simultaneously taking into account factors of information structure, prosodic well-formedness, and phrase length. This view on the syntax-prosody interface is based on a long line of previous publications (among many others Selkirk 1996;2011;Truckenbrodt 1999;Féry & Samek-Lodovici 2006;Elordieta 2007;Itô & Mester 2007;2012;2019a;2019b;Feldhausen 2010;2016;Féry 2013;Myrberg 2013b;Ishihara 2014;Elfner 2015;Bennett, Elfner & McCloskey 2016;2019;Kalivoda 2018). Laying out the full workings of the interactions between OT-constraints that generate the prosodic structures described here lies beyond the scope of this article and will be left for future research (but cf., Myrberg 2019).…”

“…Henceforth, these will be referred to as big accents and small accents respectively. 1 The distinction between big and small accent has received rather extensive attention in the literature, and by now, it seems clear that it has no direct parallel in any of the West Germanic languages (among others Bruce 1977;1982;1987;2005;Bruce, Granström, Gustafson & House 1993;Gussenhoven & Bruce 1999;Heldner 2001;Hansson 2003;Gussenhoven 2004;Ambrazaitis 2009;Myrberg 2010;2013b;Myrberg & Riad 2015;2016). In spite of the attention, the distinction between big and small accent in the intonation system of Scandinavian dialects cannot be said to be fully understood.…”

The prosodic properties of narrow information focus in Central Mexican Spanish: Pitch accents, de-emphasis and phrasing

“…It is important to note that this rather large variety of phrasing patterns is not an unexpected result. Inter-speaker variation with respect prosodic phrasing has recently been reported in numerous works; for Spanish in particular, see Feldhausen (2016) and Feldhausen & Lausecker (2018). More importantly, in spite of this inter-speaker variation, the following tendencies can be observed in these results.…”