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Prosodic prominence in Argentinian Spanish [An article from: Journal of Pragmatics]
Book Details
Author(s)L.O. Labastia
PublisherElsevier
ISBN / ASINB000P6ONDY
ISBN-13978B000P6OND6
AvailabilityAvailable for download now
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
It has often been claimed that Spanish tends to keep the nucleus at the end of the intonation phrase and resorts mainly to word order variation for marking focus. This paper aims to explore cases of early nucleus placement in Argentinian Spanish, which reveal that defocalisation is possible with or without a contrastive interpretation. These cases are accounted for from the perspective offered by Relevance Theory, in which focal prominence is considered a procedural resource to reduce cognitive effort by pointing out the most relevant part of utterances. The competing theories which explain the relation between focus and prosodic prominence (Ladd, 1996) are related to the two aspects of communication: the inferential aspect and the coding aspect. There are both purely ostensive-inferential uses of prosodic prominence, and uses where the position of the nuclear accent is determined by the metrical component. The general conclusion drawn from the data is that it would be wrong to try to subsume the whole phenomenon of focus to either aspect, since nucleus placement reflects both the natural side and the linguistically coded side of communication.
Description:
It has often been claimed that Spanish tends to keep the nucleus at the end of the intonation phrase and resorts mainly to word order variation for marking focus. This paper aims to explore cases of early nucleus placement in Argentinian Spanish, which reveal that defocalisation is possible with or without a contrastive interpretation. These cases are accounted for from the perspective offered by Relevance Theory, in which focal prominence is considered a procedural resource to reduce cognitive effort by pointing out the most relevant part of utterances. The competing theories which explain the relation between focus and prosodic prominence (Ladd, 1996) are related to the two aspects of communication: the inferential aspect and the coding aspect. There are both purely ostensive-inferential uses of prosodic prominence, and uses where the position of the nuclear accent is determined by the metrical component. The general conclusion drawn from the data is that it would be wrong to try to subsume the whole phenomenon of focus to either aspect, since nucleus placement reflects both the natural side and the linguistically coded side of communication.
