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.

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.

This book provides a state-of-the-art survey of intonation and prosody from a phonological perspective, for advanced students and researchers in phonology.

Languages differ regarding both the ways they group words into phrases and the surface cues they use to indicate relevant phrasing patterns. Modeling intonation in as many languages as possible has become a central goal of theoretical and empirical linguistics. However, intonational research has only recently begun to devote attention to the analysis of spontaneous speech, one of the central issues of this book. The volume contains eight contributions by international scholars, some of them members of the Research Center on Multilingualism (Hamburg, Germany), all of them experts on intonation and most also on multilingualism. A central goal of the present volume is to expand the cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective of phrasing, focusing thereby on languages from the Romance and Germanic families, among them Catalan, French, German, Italian, Occitan, and Spanish. Within Spanish, special attention is given to several Argentinean varieties, and within Italian, the Neapolitan variety is compared with the standard one."

"This volume brings together novel, original studies on prosody and prosodic interfaces. It consists of fifteen chapters, some of which look at word prosody and phrase prosody in individual languages, some examine the interactions between lexical tones and intonation, and others analyze the syntax-prosody interface. Despite much recent attention paid to prosody, there is yet a significant number of languages and dialects that remain largely undocumented or understudied. Many chapters in this volume contribute to this empirical gap in prosodic research by presenting new data, based on original fieldwork and experiments. Moreover, many chapters address important questions pertaining to the interactions between lexical and postlexical tones with in-depth investigations of both lexical prosody and postlexical phonology. Furthermore, other chapters tackle the question of how prosodic structure-either lexical or postlexical-interacts with syntactic structure, thereby contributing to our understanding of the interaction between multiple components of the grammar, embedded in a thorough understanding of current linguistic theories. The volume as a whole addresses many difficult issues and illuminates the question of how prosody is structured in language and functions in human communication"--

Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

A recent wave of research has explored the link between wh- syntax and prosody, breaking with the traditional generative conception of a unidirectional syntax-phonology relationship. In this book, Jason Kandybowicz develops Anti-contiguity Theory as a compelling alternative to Richards' Contiguity Theory to explain the interaction between the distribution of interrogative expressions and the prosodic system of a language. Through original and highly detailed fieldwork on several under-studied West African languages (Krachi, Bono, Wasa, Asante Twi, and Nupe), Kandybowicz presents empirically and theoretically rich analyses bearing directly on a number of important theories of the syntax-prosody interface. His observations and analyses stem from original fieldwork on all five languages and represent some of the first prosodic descriptions of the languages. The book also considers data from thirteen additional typologically diverse languages to demonstrate the theory's reach and extendibility. Against the backdrop of data from eighteen languages, Anti-contiguity offers a new lens on the empirical and theoretical study of wh- prosody.

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on focus, topic, and givenness. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including quantification, dislocation, and intonation, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including language processing and acquisition. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.