Variation at the Interfaces in Ibero-Romance. Catalan and Spanish Prosody and Word Order

Abstract

In this study we investigate how word order interacts with prosody in the expression of sentence modality and different focus constructions in different varieties of Catalan and Spanish. We analyze a corpus obtained by means of two tasks: a) a production test designed to elicit different focus constructions by means of question-answer pairs from short picture stories and b) the Discourse Completion Task methodology. The collected data were prosodically and syntactically annotated. Our data confirm that in Catalan and Spanish the intonational prominence tends to be located in clause-final position but this is completely true only for broad focus declaratives, since the main prominence can also fall on clause-initial position in Eastern Catalan and Basque Spanish informational focus declaratives or remain in situ in both informational and contrastive focus declaratives (especially in val_cat or Spanish). As for interrogative modality, an important distinction is made between languages that can present subject-verb inversion in direct questions (val_cat and Spanish) and languages that cannot (Eastern Catalan). In Eastern Catalan the subject is dislocated.

The interplay of information structure, semantics, prosody, and word ordering in Spanish intransitives

“…Similar results were found for Andean Spanish (Muntendam, 2009(Muntendam, , 2013 and Mexican Spanish (Hoot, 2012). Nuclear stress in situ has also been found to be more common than final subject placement for other regional varieties of Peninsular Spanish (Vanrell & Fernández Soriano, 2013). There are also differences in the realization of the nuclear stress accent between QUD-focus and broad focus (whether in situ or in phrase-final position): In QUD-focus the nuclear accent is generally produced with greater pitch range and an earlier pitch peak (Hualde & Prieto, 2015).…”

“…Face, 2000;Vanrell & Fernández-Soriano, to appear). It is only more recently that there has been experimental work looking at the interaction of prosody and word ordering in IS realization in Spanish (Face, 2000;Face & D'Imperio, 2005;Feldhausen & Vanrell, 2014Gabriel, 2010;Gabriel, Feldhausen, & Pesková, 2009;Hoot, 2012;Muntendam, 2009Muntendam, , 2013Vanrell & Fernández Soriano, 2013;Vanrell & Fernández-Soriano, to appear). This work has revealed considerable variation in the marking of IS between varieties of Spanish.…”

“…1 This claimed pattern of focus-related movement draws mainly from introspective or grammaticality judgments. In more recent experimental work, it has been shown that there are considerable differences in focus marking between varieties of Spanish (Face, 2000;Face & D'Imperio, 2005;Feldhausen & Vanrell, 2014Gabriel, 2010;Gabriel et al, 2009;Hoot, 2012;Muntendam, 2009Muntendam, , 2013Vanrell & Fernández Soriano, 2013;Vanrell & Fernández-Soriano, to appear). For Peninsular Spanish, Face (2000) found that while QUD-focused words were usually sentence final, speakers use nuclear stress in situ to mark QUD-focus 30% of the time, as in the English translation of (6), although Feldhausen and Vanrell (2014) found nuclear stress in situ was used to mark QUD-focus in Madrid Spanish only 15% of the time.…”

When discourse met null subjects

“…In this section I discuss the two types of foci I have concentrated on, namely Contrastive Focus and Information Focus. Intonationally, they are different (see Vanrell & Fernández Soriano (2013) on the intonation of focus in Spanish). Syntactically, Rizzi (1987) made a distinction between CF, moving to the left periphery, and IF staying low in the structure.…”

La Partición Foco–trasfondo en Las Oraciones Interrogativas Del Catalán Y Del Español: Estudio De Corpus

“…Esta diferencia se vuelve aún más destacada en las oraciones interrogativas, como varios autores han destacado recientemente (Vanrell y Fernández Soriano, 2013, Planas-Morales y , 2016. Tomemos, por ejemplo, la posición del sujeto en el siguiente par de oraciones, que nos permiten comparar la correlación entre el catalán y el español por lo que se refiere a la partición foco-trasfondo en las oraciones interrogativas:…”