Prominence Shifts in English and Spanish Parallel Constructions

Certain information theoretical distinctions that are encoded by prosody in English are encoded by word order in Spanish (Bolinger, 1954), a fact often related to the freer word order in Spanish (Lambrecht, 1994; Büring, 2010). This study reports on a production experiment that compares whether and how the two languages mark focus in cases of parallelism, where a change in word order is not an option in Spanish. Prior studies have claimed that Spanish marks focus prosodically only if the focus involved is ‘contrastive’ or ‘corrective’ (Zubizarreta, 1998), whereas English marks all types of focus prosodically. Our production results are compatible with this claim, but we offer another interpretation of the results: That the focus operator involved in prosodic focus marking in Spanish necessarily has to take scope over the entire root clause (speech act), while in English it can take scope over a broader range of constituents. 1 Focus-Driven Shifts in Sentential Prominence The pattern of prosodic prominence of utterances in which all encoded information is new and no constituent is construed as being contrastive is often viewed as the ‘default’ prosodic pattern. In English, the typical default prosodic pattern for most sentences involves a pitch accent on the last constituent (Chomsky and Halle, 1968; Cinque, 1993), and in Spanish this is even more likely to be the case (Ladd, 1990; Zubizarreta, 1998; Ladd, 2008; Büring, 2010). Examples of the default stress pattern in each language are illustrated in examples (1) and (2). (1) A: What kept you up last night? B: [A woman was SINGING]F (2) A: ¿Que te mantenı́a despierto anoche? B: [Alguna mujer CANTÓ]F The final stressed syllable of the final sentential constituent is likely to be perceived as the most prominent syllable of the sentence, often referred to as its ‘nuclear stress’. Sometimes, the main prominence is placed on a constituent other the one which would be expected to carry it by default. Such ‘prominence shifts’ encode what information is contextually given and what information is ‘focused’ or ‘contrastive’. An example is given in (3): (3) A: Who was singing last night in the street? B: [A WOMAN]F was singing. Contextually motivated shifts in sentential prominence are argued by Rooth (1992) to reflect the alternatives to an utterance that are relevant in the current context. In Rooth’s theory, every constituent comes with a set of alternatives, its ‘focus semantic value,’ in addition to its regular denotation. When there is an antecedent for focus marking, prominence falls on those constituents that are substituted in the antecedent, and is shifted away from constituents that are the same. In the present case, the question serves as the antecedent, and the relevant alternatives to B’s utterance are all of the form x was singing. Hence prominence is shifted away from from the predicate and placed on the subject by leaving the VP unaccented and/or by boosting the prominence on the subject (Breen et al., 2010). It has long been noted that the marking of focus differs between English and Appears in JerSem: The 20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, edited by Julie Hunter, Mandy Simons and Matthew Stone. New Brunswick, NJ USA, July 16-18, 2016, pages 76-85. Spanish (Bolinger, 1954), and more generally between Germanic and Romance languages (Vallduvı́, 1993; Lambrecht, 1994). One difference between focus-marking in English and Spanish is that Spanish makes use of certain word orders to mark focus that are not allowed in English. As has been described by many researchers (Bolinger, 1954; Lambrecht, 1994; Zubizarreta, 1998; Lozano, 2006; Büring, 2010; Hualde et al., 2012; Domı́nguez, 2013, i.a.), given or topical constituents are often placed earlier in an utterance, and new or focused constituents are often placed in the more prominent, sentence-final position. Under this view, a leftward shift in prominence, as was seen in English in (3), is not permitted, or at least not preferred when an alternative syntactic strategy is available: