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Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 33–70

Chapter 2
Language variation at the prosody-syntax interface

Focus in European Spanish

| Universitat de les Illes Balears
| Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Spanish is generally considered a “word order language” with respect to focus marking, since the syntactic strategies used to alter the canonical order seem to depend on focus type. Thus, prosodically motivated movement is utilized for information narrow focus, and focus fronting, clefting, and focus in situ are used in contrastive focus cases. However, recent empirical studies do not fully support this assumption. This paper investigates the effect of focus type and syntactic function of the focused constituent on the syntactic and prosodic realization of focus in different varieties of European Spanish. Our data show that Spanish employs both word order and intonation to different degrees depending on the language variety, the nature of the focused constituent (subject or object), and the constituent’s informational vs. contrastive features.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2The corpus/data
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Information focus
      • 3.1.1Focus on the subject
      • 3.1.2Focus on the direct object
    • 3.2Contrastive focus
      • 3.2.1Focus on the subject
      • 3.2.2Focus on the direct object
  • 4.A preliminary perception experiment
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.02van
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Heidinger, Steffen
2022. Corpus Data and the Position of Information Focus in Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15:1 ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo
Cruschina, Silvio
2021. Chapter 3. Focus fronting vs. wh-movement. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 357], ► pp. 50 ff. DOI logo
Mendoza Vázquez, Érika , Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo & Pedro Martín Butragueño
2020. The prosodic properties of narrow information focus in Central Mexican Spanish: Pitch accents, de-emphasis and phrasing. Loquens 7:1 ► pp. e069 ff. DOI logo
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