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. 173–200

Chapter 6
Distinguishing contrast and focus at PF

A view from Italian

| University of Hamburg

This paper argues in favor of the hypothesis that contrast and focus are two independent categories of information structure (Neeleman & Vermeulen 2012). After showing that contrast and focus have a different semantics (Torregrossa 2015), I investigate whether they are associated with different prosodic representations. In particular, I will present the results of a production experiment targeting the prosodic realization of in-situ contrast and focus constituents in the variety of Italian spoken in Rionero, in the Basilicata region. The data shows that contrast and focus are expressed by different prosodic means, involving the choice of a specific pitch contour or the modulation of phonetic variables (e.g., duration of stressed syllable or alignment of tonal targets).

Article outline
  • 1.Topic, focus and contrast in Italian sentences
  • 2.Focus and contrast: Two notions or the same notion?
  • 3.The prosody of focus and contrast in some Italian varieties
  • 4.The Experiment: Focus and contrast in Rionero Italian
    • 4.1Methodology
    • 4.2Results
      • 4.2.1Phonological strategy: Differences in the type of pitch contour (M1)
      • 4.2.2Mixed strategy: Type of pitch accent and tonal target alignment (F1)
      • 4.2.3Phonetic strategy: Different durations of the stressed syllables (F2)
  • 5.General discussion and conclusions: A different prosodic representation of contrast and focus
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.06tor
References
Bianchi, Valentina
2012 On focus movement in Italian. In Information Structure and Agreement [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 197], Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel Jiménez Fernández, Javier Martín-Gonzáles & Mariano Reyes-Tejedor (eds), 193–216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Bocci, Giuliano
2013 The Syntax-Prosody Interface: A cartographic Perspective with Evidence from Italian [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 204]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David
2009 Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (version 5.1). [URL]
Büring, Daniel
2003 On D-trees, beans and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26(5): 511–545.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
D’Imperio, Mariapaola
2002 Italian intonation: An overview and some Questions. Probus 14: 37–69.Google Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara
2000 The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Focus and Topic Constructions in Italian. Dordrecht: Kluwer.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 L’interpretazione del Focus e la portata degli operatori sintattici. In Il parlato italiano. Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Napoli (13–15 febbraio 2003), Federico Albano Leoni, Francesco Cutugno, Massimo Pettorino & Renata Savy (eds). Napoli: M. D’Auria Editore.Google Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara & Hinterhölzl, Roland
2007 Types of topics in German and Italian. In On Information Structure, Meaning and Form [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 100], Susanne Winkler, Susanne & Kerstin Schwabe (eds), 87–116. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara & Ramaglia, Francesca
2013 ‘Phasing’ contrast at the interfaces. A feature compositional approach to Topics. In Information Structure and Agreement [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 197], Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González & Mariano Reyes-Tejedor (eds), 55–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frota, Sónia, D’Imperio, Mariapaola, Elordieta, Gorka, Prieto, Pilar & Vigário, Marina
2007 The phonetics and phonology of intonational phrasing in Romance. In Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 282], Pilar Prieto, Joan Mascaró & Maria-Josep Solé (eds), 131–153. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gili Fivela, Barbara, Avesani, Cinzia, Barone, Marco, Bocci, Giuliano, Crocco, Claudia, D’Imperio, Mariapaola, Giordano, Rosa, Marotta, Giovanna, Savino, Michelina & Sorianello, Patrizia
2015 Intonational phonology of the regional varieties of Italian. In Intonation in Romance, Sónia Frota & Pilar Prieto (eds). Oxford: OUP DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giordano, Rosa
2008 On the phonetics of rhythm of Italian: patterns of duration in pre-planned and spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of the 4th Speech Prosody Conference, Plinio A. Barbosa & Sandra Madureira, César Reis. Campinas, Brazil.Google Scholar
Grice, Martine, D’Imperio, Mariapaola, Savino, Michelina & Avesani, Cinzia
2005 Strategies for intonation labelling across varieties of Italian. In Prosodic Typology: An Approach through Tone and Break Indices, Jun Sun-Ah (ed.), 362–389. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hamblin, Charles
1973 Questions in Montague English. Foundation of Language 10: 41–53.Google Scholar
Kiss, Katalin É.
1998 Identificational focus versus informational focus. Language 74: 245–273.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krifka, Manfred
2007 Basic notions of information structure. In Working Papers of the SFB632, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) 6, Caroline Féry, Gisbert Fanselow, & Manfred Krifka (eds), 13–56. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud
1994 Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus and the Mental Representation of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Molnár, Valeria
2002 Contrast from a contrastive perspective. In Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective, Hilde Hasselgard, Stig Johansson, Bergljot Behrens & Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (eds), 147–161. Amsterdam: Rodopi.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neeleman, Ad & Vermeulen, Reiko
2012 The syntactic expression of information structure. In The Syntax of Topic, Focus and Contrast. An Interface-Based Approach, Ad Neeleman & Reiko Vermeulen (eds.), 1–38. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Niebuhr, Oliver, D’Imperio Mariapaola, Gili Fivela, Barbara & Cangemi, Francesco
2011 Are there ‘shapers’ and ‘aligners’? Individual differences in signaling pitch accent category. In Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Wai-Sum Lee & Eric Zee (eds), 120–123. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Pellegrini, Giovan Battista
1977 Carta dei Dialetti d’Italia. Pisa: Pacini editore.Google Scholar
Prieto, Pilar
2009 Tonal alignment patterns in Catalan nuclear falls. Lingua 119: 865–880.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reinhart, Tanya
1981 Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence Topics. Philosophica 27: 53–94.Google Scholar
Repp, Sophie
2010 Defining ‘contrast’ as an information-structural notion in grammar. Lingua 120(6): 1333–1345.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rooth, Mats
1992 A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1: 75–116.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Selkirk, Elizabeth
2008 Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of ‘discourse-new’. Acta Hungarica Linguistica 55(3–4): 331–346.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomioka, Satoshi
2009 Contrastive topics operate on speech acts. In Information Structure: Theoretical, Typological and Experimental Perspectives, Malte Zimmermann & Caroline Féry (eds), 115–138. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torregrossa, Jacopo
2012 Encoding Topic, Focus and Contrast: Informational Notions at the Interfaces. PhD dissertation, University of Verona.Google Scholar
2013 Towards a phonological account of contrast in Italian: a pilot-study on contrastive topics. In Proceedings of the 24th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, Esa Anttikoski & Jani-Matti Tirkkonen (eds), 90–104. Joensuu: Publications of the University of Eastern Finland.Google Scholar
2015 Putting ‘contrast’ on the Table. In Proceedings of the 32nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL32). Ulrike Steindl, Thomas Borer, Huilin Fang, Alfredo García Pardo, Peter Guekguezian, Brian Hsu, Charlie O’Hara & Iris Chuoying Ouyang (eds.), 201–207. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Vermeulen, Reiko
2008 Topics in Japanese. A unified analysis of contrastive and non-contrastive topics. Ms, UCL.Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa
2010 The syntax and prosody of focus: The Bantu-Italian connection. Iberia 2(1): 131–168.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 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

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 june 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.