This dissertation proposes an experimental study of focus in Spanish, investigating, in particular, if two types of focus – Contrastive focus and Non-contrastive focus – are syntactically and prosodically distinguished. The evidence that the conceptual distinction between the focus subtypes can be represented linguistically has been found in languages (Drubig 2003, É. Kiss 1998, Gundel & Fretheim 2001, Zubizarreta 1998 to name a few). As for Spanish, Zubizarreta (1998) argued that the two types of focus most noticeably differ syntactically. While Non-contrastive Focus should appear at utterance-final position, Contrastive Focus may appear in-situ. Nevertheless, not all the studies seem to accept Zubizarreta’s (1998) syntax-oriented distinction between the two focus types. A few studies suggest that not only Contrastive Focus but also Non-Contrastive Focus can indeed occur sentence-internally (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Kim & Avelino 2003, Toledo 1989). Inspired by a handful of studies and motivated by empirical data gathered for the pilot study, the current study sets out to investigate Zubizarreta’s (1998) syntax-oriented claim on the distinction between the focus subtypes. Focus in Spanish is known to be prosodically marked by its particular intonational contour- higher pitch and the early peak, and secondarily longer duration and/or higher intensity, compared to unfocused elements in a given utterance (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Domínguez 2004a & b, Face 2000, 2001, 2002b, Hualde 2003, 2005, Kim & Avelino 2003, de la Mota 1995, 1997, Navarro Tomás 1918, Nibert 2000, Quilis 1971, Sosa 1998, Toledo 1989, Zubizarreta 1998). We assume that the distinction between the two types of focus would also be made using the existing cues, as suggested by a handful of studies on focus types (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Kim & Avelino 2003, Zubizarreta, 1998). The findings of our experiments clearly indicate that Spanish speakers consistently use different phonetic and phonological cues such as duration and pitch in order to make a distinction between the two types of focus. These findings give clear evidence that the pragmatically defined notion of focus (Lambrecht 1994) is indeed further divided into two types in Castilian Spanish, somewhat similar to the distinction made in English (Selkirk 1984, 1995). / text

This study investigates the perception of vowel lengthening in the tonada cordobesa, a feature of the Spanish spoken in Córdoba, Argentina. Unlike other dialects of Argentine Spanish, lengthening occurs in the pre-tonic syllable (Fontanella de Weinberg 1971; Yorio 1973; Lang 2010) and is believed to be accompanied by a pitch peak (Fontanella de Weinberg 1971). The goals of this dissertation are to determine if duration alone (i.e., without intonational changes) is significant in identifying a speaker’s Cordoba provenance, and to discover what listener features affect perception. A matched-guise methodology presents speech tokens with natural and manipulated pre-tonic vowel durations to Argentine listeners in a dialect identification task. Results show a main effect of speaker region and token type (natural versus manipulated). Shorter durations made Córdoba speakers difficult to identify, reducing accuracy from 59% for natural tokens to 28% for manipulated tokens with shortened pre-tonic syllables. Buenos Aires speakers received the highest identification accuracy for natural tokens (80%) and Tucumán speakers the lowest (43%). Longer pre-tonic vowel durations are associated with a Córdoba identity, regardless of speaker origin and other linguistic cues. Control tokens produced by speakers from Buenos Aires and Tucumán confirmed this effect: these tokens, when manipulated to have a longer pre-tonic vowel, induced the perception of a Córdoba identity. Listener experience is also shown to improve accuracy of dialect identification: listeners of more geographically distant provinces, relative to the speaker’s province of origin, present significantly reduced identification rates. Acoustical analyses of the Cordoba samples confirm pre-tonic lengthening as well as an early peak rise within the stressed syllable, and valley alignment before the onset of this syllable. Pre-tonic, tonic and post-tonic syllable durations are lengthened, resulting in a segmentally unbalanced intonational phrase for which prominence is disproportionately concentrated in these final segments. The durational, intonational, and rhythmic properties make the Cordoba dialect unique among regional lects within Argentina and across the Spanish-speaking world. This research contributes experimental evidence for the prosodic features marking this dialect and supports its saliency and social significance within Argentina. / text

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In this dissertation, I examine the marking of focus and givenness in Nte?kepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). The focus is, roughly, the answer to a wh-question, and is highlighted by the primary sentential accent in stress languages like English. This has been formalized as the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle. Given material is old information, and is de-accented in languages like English. Nte?kepmxcin is a stress language, but marks focus structurally. However, I argue that the structure has a prosodie motivation: the clause is restructured such that the focus is leftmost in the intonational phrase. It follows that Salish focus structures lack the special semantics that motivates the use of English structural focus (clefts). As a theoretical contribution, I show that the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle does not account for focus marking in all stress languages, nor does the "distress-given" generalization account for the marking of given information. This is because focus surfaces leftmost, while the nuclear stress position is rightmost. Instead of "stress-focus", I propose that alignment with prosodie phrase edges is the universally common thread in focus marking. This mechanism enables listeners to rapidly recover the location of the focus, by identifying coarse-grained phonological categories (p-phrases and i-phrases). In Thompson River Salish, the focus is associated with the leftmost p-phrase in the matrix intonational phrase. The analysis unifies the marking of focus across languages by claiming that focus is always marked prosodically, by alignment to a prosodie category. The study combines syntactic analysis of focus utterances with their phonetic realization and semantic characteristics. As such, this dissertation is a story about the interfaces. This research is based on a corpus of conversational data as well as single sentence elicitations, all of which are original data collected during fieldwork. The second contribution of this dissertation is thus methodological: I have developed various fieldwork techniques for collecting both spontaneous and scripted conversational discourses. The empirical contribution that results is a collection of conversational discourses, to add to the single speaker traditional texts already recorded for Nte?kepmxcin.

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In this dissertation, I examine the effects of lexical accent on the perception of intonational prominence in Japanese. I look at how an F0 accent peak is perceived relative to another flanking F0 peak in the same utterance with respect to perceived intonational prominence. Through four experiments, I show that the lexical prosodic structure plays a significant role in the perception of intonational prominence. I first show that two distinct perceptual processes are at play in the perception of relative perceived prominence in Japanese: accentual boost normalization and downstep normalization . Accentual boost normalization normalizes the accentual boost of an accented word. In this process, the extra F0 boost assigned by a lexical accent does not count as part of the F0 peak's excursion that contributes to the perceived prominence of the F0 peak. I demonstrate that when an accented word and an unaccented word are perceived as having the same prominence, the accented word has a higher F0 peak value than the unaccented word does. Downstep normalization compensates for the production effect of downstep, a pitch range compression phenomenon after a lexical accent. Experiments show that for an F0 peak to be perceived as having equivalent prominence to a preceding F0 peak, the second peak is always lower in F0 when the first word is accented than when it is unaccented. This suggests the existence of a perceptual process that normalizes the effect of downstep. I then examine the nature of accentual boost normalization and downstep normalization and show that they refer to two distinct types of lexical accent property when they are applied. One is the phonetic F0 contour shape that is characteristic of accented words. The other is the phonological lexical accent information that is uniquely specified for accented words. The experimental results show that the perceptual effects of the normalization processes are seen when only the phonological lexical accent information of a word is present with its F0 contour shape being ambiguous as well as when the same word is acoustically manipulated into different F0 contour shapes.

Zugl.: Saarbrücken, Univ., Diss., 2008

Thèse--Lettres--Strasbourg, 1982. / Bibliogr. p. 304-318.

Rozprawa habilitacyjna--Wydzaił nauk humanistycznych--Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1987. / Bibliogr. p. 178-185.