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Part of
Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 33–70

Chapter 2
Language variation at the prosody-syntax interface

Focus in European Spanish

| Universitat de les Illes Balears
| Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

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.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2The corpus/data
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Information focus
      • 3.1.1Focus on the subject
      • 3.1.2Focus on the direct object
    • 3.2Contrastive focus
      • 3.2.1Focus on the subject
      • 3.2.2Focus on the direct object
  • 4.A preliminary perception experiment
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.02van
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