Reconsidering a focal typology: evidence from Spanish and Italian

Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond, 2018

Spanish is generally considered a "Word Order Language" in the marking of focus. The syntactic strategies used to change the canonical word order seem to depend on focus type. Thus, prosodically motivated movement is proposed for information narrow focus, and focus fronting, clefting or focus in situ for contrastive focus. However, recent empirical studies do not fully agree with this assumption. This article investigates the effect of language variation and other factors such as focus type and focused constituent on the syntactic and phonological realization of focus in European Spanish. Our data demonstrate that Spanish resorts to both word order and intonation to different degrees depending especially on the language variety, but also on the focused constituent (subject or object) and the focus type (information and contrastive narrow focus).

2011

This paper presents a pilot study which investigates the perception of narrow focus in Buenos Aires Spanish, a variety of Spanish whose intonation notably diverges from the Castilian and Latin American standards of Spanish. Previous research on Spanish intonation has provided detailed descriptions of the pitch contours and prosodic correlates contrasting broad and narrow focused utterances. The majority of these studies are dedicated to the production of focus (e.g. Sosa 1991; Toledo 1989); and many are specific to the Castilian variety of Spanish (e.g. Face 2000, 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2006; Garrido et al. 1993). Previous work on focus intonation for many, but not all (e.g. Dominican Spanish, Willis 2003) varieties of Spanish, describes the alignment pattern of broad focus declarative pre-nuclear accents as a rising movement generally reaching its peak late in the tonic syllable or, more frequently in the posttonic syllable (Face 2001; Garrido et al. 1993; Hualde 2002; Prieto et al. 1...

2019

Speech Communication, 2001

This paper presents a selective state of the art for the intonation of Standard and regional varieties of Italian, drawing especially from Neapolitan Italian data. Production and perception experimental data for this variety are employed to show some interesting interactions between focus, accent placement and accent type. The issues are presented within the autosegmental-metrical approach to intonational phonology. Points for future research are suggested. 15 Use of linguistic terms such as "prominence" and "focus" was avoided. 16 The ambiguity between broad and verb focus questions was actually even stronger in three-word utterances with late accent placement.

2009

Focus background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and ...

Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2005

Prosodic and syntactic constraints conflict with each other. This is particularly evident in the expression of focus, where the best position for main stress does not necessarily match the best syntactic position for the focused constituent. But focus and stress must match, therefore either stress or the focused constituent must renounce their best position violating either the syntactic or the prosodic constraints responsible for them. This study argues that human language addresses this tension in optimality theoretic terms and that different focus paradigms across different languages reflect different rankings of a shared invariant set of syntactic and prosodic constraints. In particular, only an optimality analysis can account for the focus paradigm of Italian while keeping a prosodic analysis of main stress in accord with the last two decades of phonological research. The analysis extends naturally to focus paradigms in English, French, and Chichewa (including Chichewa's non-culminant sentences, i.e. sentences lacking a single main stress), making no appeal to language specific parametric devices. Overall, the conflicting nature of prosodic and syntactic constraints gives rise to a complex crosslinguistic typology from a single set of universal constraints while keeping interface conditions to an absolute minimum. (3) Italian: Ha riso GIANNI f Context: Who has laughed? Has laughed John

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 speakers exploit different prosodic features (i.e. scaling, alignment, and duration) to mark focus constituents. However, a phonological distinction between specific pitch categories (L+<H* vs. L+H*) cannot be established in this dialect at least for the type of focus being elicited. These findings provide further support for the consideration of languages and specific dialects in a continuum based on the degree to which they use intonation to mark focus.

Beyond Functional Sequence, 2015

2003

It is well established that focus may have prosodic reflexes in various languages. Previous data on Florentine Italian showed that broad focus and late narrow-contrastive focus utterances are marked by different pitch accents. With the present experiment we address the question whether a three way contrast exists in the intonational realization of broad, narrow-semantic and narrow-contrastive focus. Results show that while focus type (contrastive vs. noncontrastive) is signalled by different pitch accents, differences in focus scope (broad vs. narrow) are not.

2006

The function of tonic prominence or nuclear pitch accent in an intonation unit is mainly to mark the main burden or focus of the information of an utterance. However, in non-native speech the identification of the utterance focus is not always straightforward, which often obscures the intended pragmatic meaning and the understanding of the message. This study investigates how the tonic prominence is phonetically realized in non-native and English native discourse as one of the major markers of the communicative focus. The results reveal significant differences between the non-native and the English native discourse in the phonetic and phonological realization of the nuclear pitch accent in terms of pitch accent structure and pitch range, which may lead to cross-linguistic inaccuracies.

In: M. V. Camacho-Taboada, A. Jiménez Fernández, J. Martín-Gonzáles, M. Reyes-Tejedor (eds.), Information Structure and Agreement. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins., 2013

"""In this paper I discuss optional movement of focus constituents to the left periphery of the clause in Italian. Restricting my discussion to corrective exchanges – where focus occurs in a reply that denies the preceding assertion – I show that the fronted position and the ‘low’ position are not completely equivalent, in that certain contexts disallow the former, but allow the latter. I sketch out a characterization of two distinct interpretations for the focus structure: a truly corrective interpretation, and a merely contrastive one."""

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2018

We compare the use of prosodic prominence in English and French to convey focus. While previous studies have found these languages, and Germanic vs. Romance more generally, to differ in their use of prominence to encode focus (e.g., Ladd 1990; 1996; 2008; Lambrecht 1994; Cruttenden 1997; 2006), exactly what underlies the difference remains an open question. We investigate two possibilities: The difference between the languages could be due to a difference in their phonology, restricting the circumstances in which material can be prosodically reduced, as proposed in Féry (2014). Alternatively, there could be syntactic, semantic, and/or pragmatic differences concerning when prominence can be used to encode focus. We compare these hypotheses in a production study which varied the type of focus context (corrective, contrastive, parallelism) to establish the contextual conditions on when a shift in prosodic prominence can occur. The results confirm earlier claims that French uses prosodi...