The Realization of Focus in Asturian Spanish

Abstract

Spanish was classified as a language that only exploits syntactic mechanisms to mark focus. Recent experimental studies, nonetheless, have shown that speakers of different dialects are also able to use prosody to different degrees. This study aims to provide further understanding on the role played by prosody in the realization of focus in Spanish by looking at Asturian Spanish, a dialect in contact with another Romance language, Asturian. The data from a contextualized sentence completion task revealed that a phonological distinction between specific pitch categories (L+<H* vs. L+H*) cannot be established in this dialect, at least for the types of focus being elicited (i.e., informational/non-corrective vs. contrastive/corrective). Nonetheless, it also showed that speakers exploit different prosodic features (i.e., pitch range, alignment, and duration) to mark focus constituents, although their use differs as a result of that constituents' function. These findings provide further support for the consideration of languages and specific dialects in a continuum based on the degree to which they use prosody to mark focus and to explore more in detail the phonetic implementation of focal accents.

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax

“…First of all, it seems that some varieties such as Sicilian and Sardinian allow FF with (non-contrastive) information focus in congruent answers to wh-questions (Cruschina 2012;Jones 1993;. Secondly, different opinions are reported in experimental or quantitative studies, where it is in fact claimed that non-contrastive pre-verbal foci are indeed accepted by native speakers either in answers to wh-questions or in other contexts (see Gabriel 2010;Hoot 2012;Vanrell & Fernández-Soriano 2013;Feldhausen & Vanrell 2014;Uth 2014;Heidinger 2015;Jiménez-Fernández 2015a;b;Sánchez Alvarado 2018; see also Kato & Raposo 1996;Brunetti 2004;Cruschina 2012;Bianchi, Bocci & Cruschina 2015;Belletti & Rizzi 2017;Dal Farra 2018).…”

“…As we have already mentioned, in opposition to these observations, and on the basis of a different methodology for the collection of the data such as elicitation or acceptability ratings, other scholars have claimed that in Spanish -and in later comparative work, also in Catalan -non-contrastive (i.e. non-corrective) focus in answers to questions can occur sentence-initially, especially when it corresponds to the subject (see Gabriel 2007;Adli 2011;Hoot 2012;Vanrell & Fernández-Soriano 2013;Feldhausen & Vanrell 2014;Uth 2014;Heidinger 2015;Jiménez-Fernández 2015a;b;Sánchez Alvarado 2018). Gabriel (2007Gabriel ( , 2010, for example, reports data on Argentinian dialects based on semispontaneous elicitation which show that sentence-initial narrow focus is not completely excluded in Spanish.…”