Narrow presentational focus in Mexican Spanish: Experimental evidence

Abstract

It is most often claimed that in Spanish constituents in narrow presentational or information focus appear rightmost, where they also receive main sentence stress, while shifting the stress to the focus in its canonical position is infelicitous. Some, however, claim that Spanish in fact has recourse to both strategies for making the focus prominent, and some recent quantitative work has shown support for this alternative view. The present paper contributes to this debate by experimentally testing the realization of presentational focus in Mexican Spanish using an acceptability judgment task. The results of the experiment reveal that, for these speakers, focused constituents need not be rightmost and can in fact be stressed in non-final position, contra the consensus view. These findings expand the database on focus in Spanish and indicate that theories of the prosody/syntax interface may need to be revised, especially those theories that motivate discourse-related syntactic movement based on the requirements of the prosody.

Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks

“…Although ours is not the first study of object focus, previous literature on Spanish has largely favored subject focus. Additionally, there is evidence suggesting movement within the VP may be more acceptable than movement of subjects (Gabriel 2010; Leal Méndez & Slabakova 2011;Hoot 2012;Feldhausen & Vanrell 2014;Hoot 2016), a possibility we test here. Our decision to test object focus marking is also motivated by crosslinguistic evidence of an asymmetry in focus marking across constituents, whereby focus on subjects and non-subjects is realized in different ways within a single language, earning these languages the label "asymmetrical" (Zerbian 2007;Zimmermann 2008).…”

“…Recent investigations, however, present a sharp contrast to this picture. They show evidence that Spanish speakers of multiple varieties reliably prefer in-situ realizations when it comes to subject focus, as exemplified in (2) (Gabriel 2010;Hoot 2016;Leal, Destruel & Hoot 2018). 2Context: Who read a novel?…”

Narrow presentational focus in heritage Spanish and the syntax‒discourse interface

“…In fact, Sorace recognizes that this distinction may need to be revised to "instead allow for a range of interface conditions, graded according to their computational complexity and their dependence on extra-linguistic factors" (Sorace, 2012, p. 213). An alternative to the mainstream formulation of the IH, then, would be to view instability in bilingual grammars as the result of more general issues of computational or processing complexity (Hopp, 2009(Hopp, , 2011O'Grady, 2011) or variability (de Prada Pérez, 2010). Under this view, phenomena at the syntax-discourse interface have been shown to be especially problematic because they tend to be computationally complex or variable.…”

“…But unlike an internal interface construction, no transfer was observed in the object condition. In light of these mixed properties, it may be that focus falls in between, and that we should pursue a model based on complexity, with focus falling along a gradient spectrum of complexity, as suggested by Hopp (2009Hopp ( , 2011, O'Grady (2011), and Sorace (2012).…”

Pragmatic Mood Variation in Bilingual and Monolingual Yucatec Spanish

“…Language contact between Yucatec Maya and Spanish has a long history on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Linguists have noted differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers in Yucatec Spanish production with regard to phonetics (Michnowicz 2009(Michnowicz , 2011Solomon 1996Solomon , 1999 and syntax (Hoot 2014, Michnowicz 2015. Previous research (i.e.…”