Open AccessThe intonation of Italian verbless exclamatives
Author(s) -
Patrizia Sorianello
Publication year - 2020
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
DOI - 10.36505/exling-2020/11/0049/000464
Subject(s) - predicative expression , linguistics , sentence , intonation (linguistics) , phrase , salient , computer science , natural language processing , subject (documents) , information structure , variety (cybernetics) , copula (linguistics) , artificial intelligence , speech recognition , philosophy , library science
The present study aims to explore the prosodic properties of Italian verbless exclamatives (VEs), particular sentence structures without wh-quantifier and copula. A speech corpus formed by 250 VEs uttered by five subjects of a Southern variety of Italian was analyzed. The experimental results proved that VEs have a marked prosodic structure typically made up by two opposed constituents. The preposed predicative phrase is characterized by a salient intonation contour, while the grammatical subject is marginalized and shows a monotonous f0 pattern. The information structure is fixed too: the predicative constituent carries the new information, thus contrasting with the subject that expresses a given content.