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Part of
Evaluation in Context
Edited by Geoff Thompson † and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 242] 2014
► pp. 153–178

Prosody, information structure and evaluation

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The goal of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how prosodic lengthening in Spanish can be a means of marking information structure, particularly when an entire propositional content is involved. We test empirically the correlation between a form of prosodic marking used to identify a piece of content as already introduced in discourse – verum focus being a particular case of this general distinction – and evaluative values such as insistence and impatience. Native speakers consistently identify, in a perceptual experiment, the lengthened pattern with those discourse situations that involve repetition, often associated with insistence and impatience, and identify the nuclear stress as the locus of the marking.

Published online: 4 February 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.242.08esc
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Garassino, Davide & Daniel Jacob
2018. Polarity focus and non-canonical syntax in Italian, French and Spanish. In The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 249], ► pp. 227 ff. DOI logo

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