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… read more
This chapter examines how politeness in offers and requests is encoded by intonation in Catalan, a language which uses two distinct intonational pitch contours for unbiased yes-no questions. Fifteen Central Catalan speakers participated in a Discourse Completion Task that elicited offers and… read more
This paper aims to investigate whether two intonational nuclear configurations found in Majorcan Catalan wh-questions, the falling nuclear configuration and the rising-falling one, correspond to a difference in the function of focus or whether, on the contrary, this intonational difference is… read more