Chapter published in:
Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 131–172

Chapter 5
Prosodic nuclear patterns in narrow and broad focus utterances

Pragmatic and social factors in Central Mexican Spanish

| El Colegio de México
| IIFL-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

The main goal of this chapter is to discuss some of the nuclear pitch accents in the domain of broad and narrow foci in Central Mexican Spanish (CMS). Starting with a reconsideration of previous descriptions, the aim is to offer a unified vision of some of the main findings. It is hypothesized that focus marking is a phenomenon of variable and not categorical nature. Moreover, it is shown that focus marking competes with other pragmatic goals also using prosody as a relevant cue; and that focus marking is differentiated according to certain social, identity-related and stylistic factors. In this regard, we illustrate the variation of focus marking in different datasets, as well as the role of the expressive and the communicative functions of the foci. Intonational, pragmatic and sociolinguistic factor groups have been examined via up & down logistic regression models. Moreover, we show that the different tendencies of the observed intonational structures correlate with three speech styles and with some aspects of social stratification in CMS. Finally, the discussion presents a preliminary constraint model on focus domain marking in CMS that synthesizes some of the generalizations derived from the data.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Hypotheses
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Pitch accent distribution for BF and NF in CMS
  • 5.Interaction between foci and other pragmatic and discursive values in prosodic use
  • 6.Sociolinguistic correlates of focus pitch accents
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.05mar
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