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 focus in situ are used in contrastive focus cases. However, recent empirical studies do not fully support this assumption. This paper investigates the effect of focus type and syntactic function of the focused constituent on the syntactic and prosodic realization of focus in different varieties of European Spanish. Our data show that Spanish employs both word order and intonation to different degrees depending on the language variety, the nature of the focused constituent (subject or object), and the constituent’s informational vs. contrastive features.
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