Chapter 2
Aligning syntax and prosody in Galician
Against a prosodic isomorphism account
The current chapter contributes to recent studies
on the syntax and prosody of the left periphery (LP) in Romance in
general and Galician in particular. The experimental data examined
establish prosodic contours for six information structure contexts
in Galician using the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) protocol
(Cantero, 2002; Cantero & Font-Rotchés,
2009). I test the claim in e.g. Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl (2007) that
left-peripheral syntactic projections each have a unique,
corresponding prosodic contour, a claim based on one-to-one
correspondences between pitch and information structure in Italian
and German data. Findings suggest that, despite some tendencies in
support of this account, certain intonation contours are used to
encode more than one information structure type. The data examined
militate against an isomorphic account of intonation and syntax, and
instead favor a homomorphic relation between the two, thus
supporting a more parsimonious view of the LP (Emonds, 2004; Kempchinsky, 2013; López, 2009).
Article outline
- 1.Background
- 2.Review of the literature
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Results
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusions and further directions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix
References (35)
References
Barbosa, P. (2000). Clitics: A window into the null subject
property. In J. Costa (Ed.), Portuguese syntax: New comparative studies (pp. 31–93. Oxford University Press.
Bianchi, V., & Bocci, G. (2012). Should I stay or should I go? Optional focus
movement in Italian. In C. Piñón (Ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 9 (pp. 95–112). Retrieved on 18 November
2020 from [URL]
Boeckx, C. (2009). On long-distance agree. Iberia, 1(1), 1–32.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2015). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer
program]. Version 5.4.08. Retrieved 24 March
2015 from [URL]
Cantero, F. J. (2002). Teoría y análisis de la entonación. Barcelona: Edicións de la Universitat de Barcelona.
Cantero, F. J., & Font-Rotchés, D. (2009). Protocolo para el análisis melódico del
habla. Estudios de Fonética Experimental, 18, 17–32.
Castro, O. (2003). Pitch accent in Galician Spanish. In L. Sahayi (Ed.), Selected proceedings of the First Workshop on Spanish
Sociolinguistics (pp. 43–52). Cascadilla Press.
Cinque, G. (1990). Types of Ā dependencies. The MIT Press.
Costa, J. (2004). Subject positions and interfaces: The case of European
Portuguese. Mouton de Gruyter.
Emonds, J. (2004). Unspecified categories as the key to root
constructions. In D. Adger, C. De Cat, & G. Tsoulas (Eds.), Peripheries: Syntactic edges and their effects (pp. 75–120). Kluwer. 

Escourido, A. (2005). Aproximación ao estudo da focalización no
galego. In M. González González, M. Fernández Rei, & B. González Rei (Eds.), III Congreso Internacional de Fonética
Experimental (pp. 261–277). Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia.
Face, T., & d’Imperio, M. (2005). Reconsidering a focal typology: Evidence from
Spanish and Italian. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 17, 271–289.
Fernández Rubiera, F. (2009). Clitics at the edge: Clitic placement in Western
Iberian Romance languages (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Georgetown University.
Féry, C. (2017). Intonation and prosodic structure. Cambridge: CUP. 

Frascarelli, M., & Hinterhölzl, R. (2007). Types of topics in German and
Italian. In K. Schwabe & S. Winkler (Eds.), On information structure, meaning and form (pp. 87–116). John Benjamins. 

Gupton, T. (2012). Object clitics in Galician and complications for
clausal analyses. In K. Geeslin & M. Díaz-Campos (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 14th Hispanic Linguistics
Symposium (pp. 272–284. Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Gupton, T. (2014). The syntax-information structure interface. Clausal word
order and the left periphery in Galician. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 

Kempchinsky, Paula. (2013). CLLD as a window on the left
periphery. In C. Howe, S. Blackwell, & M. Lubbers Quesada, Selected proceedings of the 15th Hispanic Linguistics
Symposium (pp. 310–327). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Kuroda, S.-Y. (1972). The categorical and the thetic judgment: Evidence
from Japanese syntax. Foundations of Language, 9(2).153–185.
Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational phonology. Cambridge University Press. 

Leonetti, M., & Escandell-Vidal, M. (2009). Fronting and verum focus in
Spanish. In A. Dufter & D. Jacob, Focus and background in Romance languages (pp. 155–204). John Benjamins. 

López, L. (2009). A derivational syntax for information structure. Oxford University Press. 

Mateo Ruiz, M. (2013). La entonación del español
meridional (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Universitat de Barcelona.
Murray, K. (2001). A study of automatic pitch tracker
doubling/halving ‘errors’. Proceedings of the Second SIGdial Workshop on Discourse
and Dialogue. Aalborg, Denmark. Retrieved on 18 November
2020 from [URL]. 
Neeleman, A., Titov, E., van de Koot, H., & Vermeulen, R. (2009). A syntactic typology of topic, focus and
contrast. In J. Craenenbroeck (Ed.), Alternatives to cartography (pp. 15–51). De Gruyter. 

Ordóñez, F. (2000). The clausal structure of Spanish: A comparative
study. Garland.
Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The phonology and phonetics of English
intonation (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). MIT.
Repp, S. (2016). Contrast: Dissecting an elusive
information-structural notion and its role in
grammar. In C. Féry & S. Ishihara (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of information structure (pp. 270–289). Oxford University Press.
Rizzi, L. (1997). The fine structure of the left
periphery. In L. Haegeman, Elements of grammar (pp. 281–337). Dordrecht: Kluwer. 

Sönmez, K., Shriberg, E., Heck, L., & Weintraub, M. (1998). Modeling dynamic prosodic variation for speaker
verification. In R. H. Mannell & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on
Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP’98), Sydney,
Australia (Vol. 7, pp. 3189–3193). Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.
Titov, E. (2012). Encoding focus and contrast in
Russian. In A. Neeleman & R. Vermeulen (Eds.), The syntax of topic, focus, and contrast (pp. 119–155). Mouton de Gruyter. 

Vanrell, M., & Fernández Soriano, O. (2013). Variation at the interfaces in Ibero-Romance.
Catalan and Spanish prosody and word order. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 12, 253–282. 

Zubizarreta, M. L. (1998). Prosody, focus, and word order. The MIT Press.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Levshina, Natalia, Savithry Namboodiripad, Marc Allassonnière-Tang, Mathew Kramer, Luigi Talamo, Annemarie Verkerk, Sasha Wilmoth, Gabriela Garrido Rodriguez, Timothy Michael Gupton, Evan Kidd, Zoey Liu, Chiara Naccarato, Rachel Nordlinger, Anastasia Panova & Natalia Stoynova
2023.
Why we need a gradient approach to word order.
Linguistics 61:4
► pp. 825 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.