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Intonation in Language Contact
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 439

Intonation in Language Contact

The intense language contact between Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia has led to cross-linguistic influence at all linguistic levels, but its effect on the prosody of these languages has received little attention to date. Based on semi-spontaneous and read speech data from 31 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the intonation of Spanish and Catalan as spoken in Girona, with a focus on the speakers’ bilingualism. These contact varieties share numerous intonational properties, with differences mainly in the frequency of specific tunes in certain contexts. However, they also exhibit significant variation, often linked to extralinguistic factors such as the bilinguals’ language dominance. Overall, the intonation of these contact varieties results from substratum transfer and wholesale convergence between the prosodic systems of Spanish and Catalan. The book is particularly relevant to scholars researching prosody, language contact, variation, and multilingualism.

The intonation of expectations
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 302

The intonation of expectations

This book provides a new perspective on prosodically marked declaratives, wh-exclamatives, and discourse particles in the Madrid variety of Spanish. It argues that some marked forms differ from unmarked forms in that they encode modal evaluations of the at-issue meaning. Two epistemic evaluations that can be shown to be encoded by intonation in Spanish are obviousness and mirativity, which present the at-issue meaning as expected and unexpected, respectively. An empirical investigation via a production experiment finds that they are associated with distinct intonational features under constant focus scope, with stances of (dis)agreement showing an impact on obvious declaratives. Wh-exclamati...

The Pragmatics of Catalan
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 401

The Pragmatics of Catalan

This book aims to disseminate at an international level a set of innovative studies whose descriptive and applied point of reference is the Catalan language. The volume constitutes a significant contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics and also to a broad range of grammatical and cognitive issues which have been approached from the pragmatic perspective.

The Expression of Information Structure
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 476

The Expression of Information Structure

Information structure deals with the linguistic forms and techniques that support the integration of what is said into the current informational and attentional state of the addressee. This shows in categories like topic-comment structuring, focus to highlight expressions, marking of givenness and of presupposed information, and ways to indicate that the information provided is restricted. The book relates infor-mation structure to theoretical models of grammar, to computation and modelling and brings together what is known about the expression of information structure in human language with regard to its empirical investigation, its psycholinguistic aspects and the acquisition of informatio...

Sentential Form and Prosodic Structure of Catalan
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 305

Sentential Form and Prosodic Structure of Catalan

This monograph presents an experimental and theoretical inquiry into the role of sentential form and variation in the prosodic structure of Catalan. The empirical section examines intonational phrasing across sentence forms, including SVO structures with either nominal or sentential objects and structures involving clitic left- and right-dislocations. The results show variation in phrasing that depends on syntactic factors and non-syntactic factors such as topic-hood and prosodic binarity. The theoretical section uses Stochastic Optimality Theory to model the variation and frequency distributions associated with the observed prosodic patterns. Various syntactic and non-syntactic factors are represented by alignment constraints, which play a major role in Catalan, and by constraints that limit size and those that limit the overall amount of prosodic structure. This study represents a combined approach to prosody and syntax and is of particular relevance for theoretical and empirical linguists interested in the relationship between these domains both in Catalan and other languages.

Syntax Processing
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 270

Syntax Processing

This volume deals with research on the processing of a native language, second language learning, bilingualism, typical and impaired syntax processing. The articles presented here cover a number of linguistic phenomena, including passives, temporal concord, object pronouns, reflexives, embedded sentences, relative clauses, wh-movement, and binding theory. They also apply various experimental methods, such as eye tracking, reaction times, event-related potentials, picture selection tasks, sentence elicitation, pupillometry, and picture matching tasks. As such, this book details a number of the most representative methods used in language processing.

Intonation in Romance
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 500

Intonation in Romance

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2015
  • -
  • Publisher: Unknown

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.

Prosody and Iconicity
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 269

Prosody and Iconicity

The contributions to this volume focus on the interrelation between prosody and iconicity and shed new light on the topic by enlarging the number of parameters traditionally considered, and by confronting various theoretical backgrounds. The parameters taken into account include socio-linguistic criteria (age, sex, socio-economic category, region); different kinds of speech situation; affect (attitudes and emotions); gestures; morpho-syntactic constraints. The analysis is pursued in theoretical frameworks such as Information Structure theory, Grice's theory, Relevance theory, experiential blending, Gussenhoven's biological codes, prosodic modelling, automatic detection. The languages covered include English, French, Italian, Swedish, Egyptian Arabic, and Majorcan Catalan. The book will be of great interest to linguists working on prosody.

The Grammar of the Utterance
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 369

The Grammar of the Utterance

"This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with utterance-oriented elements such as vocatives, interjections, and particles; and to what they do with illocutionary complementisers, items attested cross-linguistically which look like, but do not behave like, subordinators. Taking the behaviour of conversation-oriented units of language as a window into the indexical nature of language, it argues that these items provide insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. By identifying the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance co...

L2 Spanish and Italian intonation
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 390

L2 Spanish and Italian intonation

The main aim of this book is to contribute to our understanding of the acquisition of second language intonation, by comparing Czech learners of Spanish with German learners of Spanish and Czech learners of Italian. By means of a large production database, the study seeks to uncover how L1-to-L2 intonational transfer works and what role prosodic (dis)similarities between languages play. Contrary to most previous research, the work presents an original multidirectional cross-linguistic comparison and examines different types of sentence, such as neutral and non-neutral statements, yes/no questions, wh-questions, exclamatives and vocatives. The findings reveal positive and negative transfer fr...