Article published in:
Intonational Phrasing in Romance and Germanic: Cross-linguistic and bilingual studiesEdited by Christoph Gabriel and Conxita Lleó
[Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 10] 2011
► pp. 75–94
Phrasing, register level downstep and partial topic constructions in Neapolitan Italian
In this paper, we analyze data from Neapolitan Italian showing that register level downstep across prosodic phrases can be a function of information structure and specific discourse strategies. Specifically, we hypothesized that in NP VP sentences, Partial (and thus contrastive) Topic NP phrases are followed by a phrase break and by a downstepped register level in the VP phrase, while this is not true in non-contrastive constructions. We also show that this type of register level downstep is not to be confused with the extreme register compression effect caused by early, contrastive focus (on the sentence-initial NP), though both Partial Topic and Contrastive Focus on a Subject NP appear to induce a phrase break between the NP and the VP phrase.
Keywords: contrastive focus, Neapolitan Italian, partial topic, preboundary lengthening, register level downstep
Published online: 26 January 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsm.10.05dim
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsm.10.05dim