Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Focus realization strategies in Spanish by mono- and bilinguals

Ingo Feldhausen (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

In this paper, we shed new light on the question of how narrow contrastive and information focus is realized in Central-Peninsular Spanish and propose a stochastic optimality-theoretic approach (SOT, Boersma & Hayes 2001) to account for the attested variation. Our study includes two groups: (a) monolingual native speakers and (b) German-Spanish early bilingual speakers living in Germany. Results from a production experiment based on semi-spontaneous speech show that there is an important difference with respect to the use of both pitch accents and syntactic strategies for realizing focus between the two groups. Our study reveals five main findings:

(a)     Bilingual speakers realize both types of focus almost always by stress shift ([_FLos aLUMnos] se enfrentaron con la policía‘The students confronted the police’), and the pitch accent is predominantly realized by L+H*;

(b)     Monolingual speakers, in turn, realize information focus not by a single strategy, but by different strategies (namely p-movement, clefting, and focus fronting) – note that stress shift is not a relevant option (see also Feldhausen & Vanrell 2015);

(c)     Cleft constructions are used by monolinguals for both focus types even though there are certain preferences: (inverted) pseudo-clefts are favored for neutral focus, while simple clefts are preferred for contrastive focus;

(d)     Focus does not have to bear always sentential stress (contradicting the Focus Prosody Correspondence Principle, Chomsky 1971, Jackendoff 1972, Zubizarreta 1998): in clefts, prosodic alignment can be a sufficient correlate of focus;

(e)     Monolinguals typically realize the pitch accents by L+H* for non-final focused constituents and L* for final focused constituents.

The results are accounted for by means of a SOT approach using established constraints from work on intonational phrasing, focus marking and cleft constructions (such as AlignFocus-ι-R and Head-ι-R from Féry 2013, Subject from Grimshaw & Samek-Lodovici 1998, or FocusCleft from Destruel 2013). The proposed model offers clear advantages over approaches such as the one proposed by Gutiérrez-Bravo (2002), since it accounts for both the variation attested in the data and the use of clefts.

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