Cover not available
Part of
Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 1–30

Chapter 1
Introduction

Core issues of focus realization in Romance

| University of Cologne
| University of Cologne
Despite numerous theoretical approaches and empirical analyses, it is not entirely clear how different focus types and constructions are realized and interpreted in individual Romance languages. Due to the complexity of this linguistic area, an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic approach seems most appropriate for exploring the topic further. This introductory article gives an overview of the core problems related to focus realization in Romance, such as methodological incongruences, differences regarding the conceptualization of focus categories, and nonobservance of diatopic variation. Moreover, it gives an outline of the present volume and situates the contributions with respect to the aforementioned issues.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Focus categories
  • 4.Diatopic variation
    • 4.1Syntactic variation
    • 4.2Prosodic variation
  • 5.Outline of the volume
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.01uth
References (91)
References
Adli, Aria. 2005. Gradedness and consistency in grammaticality judgments. In Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives [Studies in Generative Grammar 85], Stephan Kepser & Marga Reis (eds), 7–25. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. A heuristic mathematical approach for modelling constraint cumulativity: Contrastive focus in Spanish and Catalan. The Linguistic Review 28(2): 111–173.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Andersen, Gisle. 2014. Pragmatic borrowing. Journal of Pragmatics 67: 17–33.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barnes, Hilay & Michnowicz, Jim. 2013. A sociolinguistic analysis of prenuclear peak alignment in Yucatan Spanish. In Selected Proceedings of the 15th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Chad Howe, Sarah E. Blackwell & Margaret Lubbers Quesada (eds), 221–235. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina, Bocci, Giuliano & Cruschina, Silvio. 2016. Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures. Semantics and Pragmatics 9(3): 1–54.Google Scholar
Bosque, Ignacio. 1999. On focus vs. wh-movement. The case of Caribbean Spanish. Sophia Linguistica 44–45: 1–32.Google Scholar
Buitrago, Natalia. 2013. Types of Focus in Spanish: Exploring the Connection between Function and Realization. MA thesis, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Büring, Daniel. 2006. Intonation und Informationsstruktur. In Text – Verstehen: Grammatik und darüber hinaus [Institut für Deutsche Sprache Jahrbuch 2005], Hardarik Blühdorn, Eva Breindl & Ulrich H. Waßner (eds), 144–163. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Büring, Daniel & Gutiérrez-Bravo, Rodrigo. 2001. Focus-related constituent order variation without the NSR: A prosody-based crosslinguistic analysis. In Proceedings of SASC 3: Syntax and Semantics at Santa Cruz, James McCloskey (ed.), 41–58. Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Camacho, José. 2006. In situ focus in Caribbean Spanish: Towards a unified account of focus. In Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Nuria Sagarra & Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (eds), 13–23. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1971. Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation. In Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, Danny Steinberg & Leon A. Jakobovits (eds), 183–216. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Colantoni, Laura, Cuza, Alejandro & Mazzaro, Natalia. 2016. Task related effects in the prosody of Spanish heritage speakers. In Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Languages 6], Meghan E. Armstrong, Nicholas Henriksen & Maria del Mar Vanrell (eds), 3–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio. 2012. Discourse-related Features and Functional Projections. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Curnow, Timothy J. & Travis, Catherine E. 2004. The emphatic es construction of Colombian Spanish. In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, Christo Moskovsky (ed.), 1–11. Newcastle: University of Newcastle.Google Scholar
D’Imperio, Mariapaola. 2001. Focus and tonal structure in Neapolitan Italian. Speech Communication 33(4): 339–356.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2002. Italian intonation: An overview and some questions. Probus 14(1): 37–69.Google Scholar
de-la-Mota, Carme. 1997. Prosody of sentences with contrastive new information in Spanish. In Proceedings of Intonation: Theory, Models, and Applications, Antonis Botinis (ed.), 75–78. Grenoble: European Speech Communication Association.Google Scholar
de-la-Mota, Carme, Martín Butragueño, Pedro & Prieto, Pilar. 2010. Mexican Spanish intonation. In Transcription of Intonation in the Spanish language, Pilar Prieto & Paolo Roseano (eds), 319–350. München: Lincom.Google Scholar
Dimroth, Christine & Benazzo, Sandra. 2018. Developing strategies for encoding additive and contrastive relations in French and German child narratives. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 201], Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), ##–##. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (this volume)DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Domínguez, Laura. 2004a. Mapping Focus: The Syntax and Prosody of Focus in Spanish. PhD dissertation, Boston University.Google Scholar
. 2004b. The effects of phonological cues on the syntax of focus constructions in Spanish. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2002 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 256], Reineke Bok-Bennema, Bart Hollebrandse, Brigitte Kampers-Manhe & Petra Sleeman (eds), 69–82, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. Understanding Interfaces: Second Language Acquisition and First Language Attrition of Spanish Subject Realization and Word Order Variation [Language Acquistition and Language Disorders 55]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Face, Timothy L. 2000. Prosodic manifestations of focus in Spanish. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 19: 45–62.Google Scholar
2001. Focus and early peak alignment in Spanish intonation. Probus 13(2): 223–246.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002a. Local intonational marking of Spanish contrastive focus. Probus 14(1): 71–92.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002b. Intonational Marking of Contrastive Focus in Madrid Spanish. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
2002c. Spanish evidence for pitch-accent structure. Linguistics 40: 319–345.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003a. Intonation in Spanish declaratives: Differences between lab speech and spontaneous speech. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 2: 115–131.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003b. Effects of syntactic constituency on the intonational marking of Spanish contrastive focus. In Linguistic Theory and Language Development in Hispanic Languages: Papers from the 5th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium and the 4th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese, Silvina Montrul & Francisco Ordóñez (eds), 119–137. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Face, Timothy L. & D’Imperio, Mariapaola. 2005. Reconsidering a focal typology: Evidence from Spanish and Italian. Italian Journal of Linguistics 17(2): 271–289.Google Scholar
Feldhausen, Ingo & Vanrell, Maria del Mar. 2014. Prosody, focus and word order in Catalan and Spanish – An optimality theoretic approach. In Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP), 5–8 May 2014, Köln (Germany), 122–125.Google Scholar
Frota, Sónia & Prieto, Pilar. 2015. Intonation in Romance. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gabriel, Christoph. 2007. Fokus im Spannungsfeld von Phonologie und Syntax: Eine Studie zum Spanischen. Frankfurt: Vervuert.Google Scholar
. 2010. On focus, prosody, and word order in Argentinean Spanish: A minimalist OT account. Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem – ReVEL Special edition n. 4: 183–222.Google Scholar
Gabriel, Christoph, Feldhausen, Ingo, Pešková, Andrea, Colantoni, Laura, Lee, Su-Ar, Arana, Valeria & Labastía, Leopoldo. 2010. Argentinian Spanish intonation. In Transcription of Intonation in the Spanish Language, Pilar Prieto & Paolo Roseano (eds), 285–317. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Gabriel, Christoph & Kireva, Elena. 2012. Intonation und Rhythmus im spanisch-italienischen Kontakt: Der Fall des Porteño-Spanischen. In Testo e ritmi. Zum Rhythmus in der italienischen Sprache [Studia Romanica et Linguistica 35], Elmar Schafroth & Maria Selig (eds), 131–149. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Gabriel, Christoph & Grünke, Jonas. 2018. Focus, prosody, and subject position in L3 Spanish: Analyzing data from German learners with Italian and European Portuguese as heritage languages. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 201], Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), ##–##. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (this volume)DOI logoGoogle Scholar
García García, Marco. 2018. NP exclamatives and focus. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 201], Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), ##–##. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (this volume)DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez Bravo, Rodrigo. 2006. Structural Markedness and Syntactic Structure: A Study of Word Order and The Left Periphery in Mexican Spanish. New York NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2008. La identificación de los tópicos y los focos. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 56: 362–401.Google Scholar
Gutiérrez Bravo, Rodrigo, Sobrino, Martín & Uth, Melanie. In press. Contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. In The syntactic Variation of Spanish Dialects, Ángel J. Gallego (eds). Oxford: OUP.
Haiman, John. 1993. Iconicity. In Syntax. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung/An International Handbook of Contemporary Research 9(1), Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Theo Vennemann (eds), 896–904. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Heidinger, Steffen. 2014. Fronting and contrastively focused secondary predicates in Spanish. In Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, Variationist and Comparative Perspectives [Linguistik Akuell/Linguistics Today 112], Andreas Dufter & Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo y Huerta (eds), 125–153. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
. 2018. Acceptability and frequency in Spanish focus marking. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 201], Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), ##–##. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (this volume)DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoot, Bradley. 2016. Narrow presentational focus in Mexican Spanish: Experimental evidence. Probus 28(2): 335–365.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Horn, Laurence. 1973. Greek Grice: A briefsurvey of proto-conversational rules in the history of logic. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 9: 205–214.Google Scholar
Hualde, José Ignacio. 2005. The Sounds of Spanish. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Hualde, Jose Ignacio & Prieto, Pilar. 2015. Intonational variation in Spanish. In Intonation in Romance, Sónia Frota & Pilar Prieto (eds), 350–391. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel L. 2015. When focus goes wild: An empirical study of two syntactic positions for information focus. Linguistics Beyond and Within 1: 119–133.Google Scholar
Kany, Charles. 1963. American-Spanish Syntax. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kato, Mary A. & Mioto, Carlos. 2016. Pseudo-clefts and semi-clefts. An analysis based on Portuguese. In The morphosyntax of Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America, Mary A. Kato & Francisco Ordóñez (eds), 286–307. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In The Notions of Information Structure [Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 6], Caroline Féry, Gisbert Fanselow & Manfred Krifka (eds), 13–55. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Méndez Vallejo, Dunia Catalina. 2009. Focalizing ser (‘to be’) in Colombian Spanish. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Mioto, Carlos. 2012. Reduced pseudoclefts in Caribbean Spanish and in Brazilian Portuguese. In Enjoy Linguistics! Papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the Occasion of his 60th birthday, Valentina Bianchi & Cristiano Chesi (eds.), 287–302. Siena: CISCL Press.Google Scholar
Muntendam, Antje & Torreira, Francisco. 2016. Focus and prosody in Spanish and Quechua. In Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 6], Meghan E. Armstrong, Nicholas Henriksen & Maria del Mar Vanrell (eds), 69–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
O’Rourke, Erin. 2012a. Intonation in Spanish. In The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics [Blackwell Handbook in Linguistics 36], Jose Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea & Erin O’Rourke (eds), 173–191. Oxford: Blackwell.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2012b. The realization of contrastive focus in Peruvian Spanish intonation. Lingua 122(5): 494–510.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortega-Santos, Iván. 2016. Focus-related Operations at the Right Edge in Spanish: Subjects and Ellipsis [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 7]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prieto, Pilar & Roseano, Paolo. 2010. Transcription of Intonation in the Spanish Language. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1978. A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language 54(4): 883–906.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1988. On pragmatic change: The borrowing of discourse functions. Journal of Pragmatics 12: 505–518.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reich, Uli. 2018. Presupposed modality. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 201], Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), ##–##. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (this volume)DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Revert Sanz, Vicente. 2001. Entonación y variación geográfica en el español de América. València: Univ. de València.Google Scholar
Rothman, Jason. 2010. On the typological economy of syntactic transfer: Word order and relative clause high/low attachment preference in L3 Brazilian Portuguese. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Teaching 48: 245–273.Google Scholar
. 2011. L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinacy: The typological primacy model. Second Language Research 27: 107–127.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schütze, Carson T. 2005. Thinking about what we are asking speakers to do. In Linguistic evidence: Empirical, theoretical and computational problems [Studies in Generative Grammar 85], Stephan Kepser & Marga Reis (eds), 457–484. Berlin: De Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schütze, Carson T. & Sprouse, John. 2013. Judgment data. In Research Methods in Linguistics, Robert J. Podesva & Devyani Sharma (eds), 27–50. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Schwab, Sandra & Avanzi, Mathieu. 2015. Regional variation and articulation rate in French. Journal of Phonetics 48: 96–105.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sedano, Mercedes. 1990. Hendidas y otras construcciones con ser en el habla de Caracas. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela.Google Scholar
. 2001. Estructuras focalizadoras en español y portugués. Filología e Lingüística Portuguesa 4: 53–68.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2003. Seudohendidas y oraciones con verbo ser focalizador en dos corpus del español hablado de Caracas. Revista Internacional de Linguistica Iberoamericana 1(1): 175–204.Google Scholar
Sosa, Juan Manuel. 1999. La entonación del español: Su estructura fónica, variabilidad y dialectología. Madrid: Cátedra.Google Scholar
Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline. 1992. Proper government in Spanish subject relativization. Probus 4(3): 291–304.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2002. Focus on clefts in Dominican Spanish. In Structure, Meaning, and Acquisition of Spanish, James F. Lee, Kimberly L. Geeslin & Clancy Clements (eds), 130–146. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Trips, Carola & Stein, Achim. 2018. Cleft sentences in the history of French and English. A comparative perspective. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 201], Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), ##–##. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (this volume)DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uth, Melanie. 2014. Spanish preverbal subjects in contexts of narrow information focus: Non-contrastive focalization or epistemic-evidential marking? Grazer Linguistische Studien 78: 87–104.Google Scholar
. In press. Traces of language contact in intonation. The case of Yucatecan Spanish. In Prosodic Issues in Language Contact Situations [special issue of Spanish in Context], Yolanda Congosto (ed.).
. 2018. Focus realization at the prosody-syntax interface: Yucatecan Spanish opposed to Standard Mexican Spanish. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 201], Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), ##–##. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (this volume)DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Rijswijk, Remy & Muntendam, Antje. 2012. The prosody of focus in the Spanish of Quechua-Spanish bilinguals: A case study on noun phrases. International Journal of Bilingualism 18(6): 614–632.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vanrell, Maria del Mar, Stella, Antonio, Gili Fivela, Barbara & Prieto, Pilar. 2013. Prosodic manifestations of the Effort Code in Catalan, Italian and Spanish contrastive focus. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 43(2): 195–220.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vanrell, Maria del Mar, Feldhausen, Ingo & Astruc, Lluïsa. in press. The Discourse Completion Task in Romance prosody research: Status quo and outlook. In Methods in Prosody: A View from Romance Languages, Ingo Feldhausen, Jan Fließbach & Maria del Mar Vanrell (eds). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Vanrell, Maria del Mar & Fernández-Soriano, Olga. 2013. Variation at the interfaces in Ibero-Romance. Catalan and Spanish prosody and word order. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 12: 253–282.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Petra, Trouvain, Jürgen & Zimmerer, Frank. 2015. In defense of stylistic diversity in speech research. Journal of Phonetics 48: 1–12.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weskott, Thomas & Fanselow, Gisbert. 2011. On the informativity of different measures of linguistic acceptability. Language 87(2): 249–273.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wheeler, Dana. 1982. Portuguese pseudoclefts: Evidence for free relatives. In Papers from the Eighteenth Regional meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society 18, Kevin Tuite, Robinson Schneider & Robert Chametzky (eds), 507–520. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Xu, Yi. 2010. In defense of lab speech. Journal of Phonetics 38(3): 329–336.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zubizarreta, Maria L. 1998. Prosody, Focus, and Word Order. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
1999. Las funciones informativas: Tema y foco. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds), 4215–4244. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, Maria L. & Nava, Emily. 2011. Encoding discourse-based meaning: Prosody vs. syntax. Implications for second language acquisition. Lingua 121(4): 652–669.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zubizarreta, Maria L. 2016. Nuclear Stress and Information Structure. In The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds), 165–184. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Garassino, Davide & Daniel Jacob
2022. Introduction. When data challenges theory. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
Heidinger, Steffen
2022. Corpus Data and the Position of Information Focus in Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15:1 ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. 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.