Open AccessThe Realization of Focus in Asturian Spanish
Author(s) -
Covadonga Sánchez-Alvarado
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of portuguese linguistics/journal of portuguese linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2397-5563
pISSN - 1645-4537
DOI - 10.5334/jpl.176
Subject(s) - prosody , focus (optics) , linguistics , realization (probability) , sentence , romance languages , pitch accent , psychology , exploit , computer science , mathematics , philosophy , physics , statistics , optics , computer security
Spanish was classified as a language that only exploits syntactic mechanisms to mark focus. Recent experimental studies, nonetheless, have shown that speakers of different dialects are also able to use prosody to different degrees. This study aims to provide further understanding on the role played by prosody in the realization of focus in Spanish by looking at Asturian Spanish, a dialect in contact with another Romance language, Asturian. The data from a contextualized sentence completion task revealed that a phonological distinction between specific pitch categories (L+