An experimental investigation of narrow focus in heritage and monolingual Spanish (original) (raw)

Presentational focus in heritage and monolingual Spanish

In Spanish, it is most commonly claimed that constituents in narrow presentational focus appear rightmost, where they also get main stress (1a), while stress in situ (1b) is infelicitous. (1) [Context: Who bought a car?] a. Compró un carro mi [MAMÁ]F. bought a car my mom b. Mi [MAMÁ]F compró un carro. However, some recent evidence challenges this view, claiming that stress in situ (1b) is a possible strategy for marking focus in Spanish. This dissertation contributes new experimental evidence to this debate. Additionally, because focus involves the complex interplay of prosody, syntax, and discourse context, it is especially of interest when considering bilingual individuals. The grammars of heritage speakers of Spanish (that is, U.S.-born English-dominant bilinguals) are significantly different in a number of ways from those of Spanish monolinguals. One way they have been shown to differ is in phenomena regulated by the interfaces of syntax with other linguistic systems, i.e., precisely phenomena like presentational focus. We might thus expect that monolinguals and bilinguals would realize focus differently, as with other interface phenomena, and this dissertation brings experimental evidence to bear on this question as well. This dissertation thus has the dual motivation of investigating both presentational focus in Spanish and heritage grammars. It proposes an analysis of focus in Spanish in terms of conflicting constraints on well-formedness, using Optimality Theory, and then tests this analysis experimentally. The experiment consists of a contextualized aural acceptability judgment task, in which both monolinguals and heritage speakers listened to sentences in context and judged their discourse appropriateness. The main findings of the experiment were (i) both heritage speakers and monolinguals use stress shift (1b) to realize presentational focus, and (ii) monolinguals and heritage speakers did not differ from one another. The first finding runs contra the consensus in the literature and thus contributes to the growing challenge to this view, indicating that some common approaches to focus in Spanish may need to be rethought. The second finding was also counter expectations, and thus contributes evidence toward a more fine-grained understanding of heritage grammars with regard to interface phenomena. The results of this study are relevant to future studies of focus and other information-structural phenomena, as well as to future studies of heritage grammars and language contact, and it contributes new experimental data to both fields.

Narrow Presentational Focus in Mexican Spanish: Experimental Evidence

Probus

It is most often claimed that in Spanish constituents in narrow presentational or information focus appear rightmost, where they also receive main sentence stress, while shifting the stress to the focus in its canonical position is infelicitous. Some, however, claim that Spanish in fact has recourse to both strategies for making the focus prominent, and some recent quantitative work has shown support for this alternative view. The present paper contributes to this debate by experimentally testing the realization of presentational focus in Mexican Spanish using an acceptability judgment task. The results of the experiment reveal that, for these speakers, focused constituents need not be rightmost and can in fact be stressed in non-final position, contra the consensus view. These findings expand the database on focus in Spanish and indicate that theories of the prosody/syntax interface may need to be revised, especially those theories that motivate discourse-related syntactic movement based on the requirements of the prosody.

Prosodic realization of focus in the discourse of Spanish learners and English native speakers

2006

The function of tonic prominence or nuclear pitch accent in an intonation unit is mainly to mark the main burden or focus of the information of an utterance. However, in non-native speech the identification of the utterance focus is not always straightforward, which often obscures the intended pragmatic meaning and the understanding of the message. This study investigates how the tonic prominence is phonetically realized in non-native and English native discourse as one of the major markers of the communicative focus. The results reveal significant differences between the non-native and the English native discourse in the phonetic and phonological realization of the nuclear pitch accent in terms of pitch accent structure and pitch range, which may lead to cross-linguistic inaccuracies.

The realization of information focus in monolingual and bilingual native Spanish

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2017

The strategies used to signal information focus — the non-presupposed part of a sentence — in Spanish are under debate. The literature suggests that focus must appear rightmost; however, empirical evidence shows that speakers also realize focus in-situ. Moreover, there is limited research investigating the effects of language variety or knowledge of another language on focus marking. We address these questions via a paced elicited production task, testing speakers who learned Spanish naturalistically in infancy, including two groups of monolinguals and two groups of Spanish/English bilinguals: (a) Spanish natives who learned English after childhood, and (b) early bilinguals exposed to English in early childhood (heritage speakers). Confirming previous empirical studies, results show that all participant groups choose a similar range of focus-marking strategies, vastly preferring in-situ marking with rightmost marking used rarely. Results challenge both theoretical accounts of Spanis...

Narrow presentational focus in heritage Spanish and the syntax-discourse interface

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism

The grammars of bilinguals have been found to differ from those of monolinguals especially with regard to phenomena that involve the interface of syntax and discourse/pragmatics. This paper examines one syntax-discourse interface phenomenon—presentational focus—in the grammars of heritage speakers of Spanish. The results of a contextualized acceptability judgment task indicate that lower proficiency heritage speakers show some variability in the structures they accept to realize focus, whereas higher proficiency heritage bilinguals pattern with monolinguals. These results suggest that some explanations of domain-specific vulnerability in bilingual grammars, including the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), may need to be revised.

SYNTACTIC AND PROSODIC MARKING OF SUBJECT FOCUS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND PENINSULAR SPANISH

The aim of the present study is to provide an account of the different strategies, both syntactic and prosodic, employed by American English and Peninsular Spanish speakers in subject focus marking. Data obtained through parallel experimental designs revealed that prosodic marking of focus in-situ is possible in both languages both for informational and contrastive focus. Nonetheless, in the expression of contrastive focus Peninsular Spanish speakers increase the use of clefting while American English speakers exploit prosodic strategies like creaky voice. Differences in the pitch range implemented on focalized subjects were against the posed prediction. This study, nonetheless, contributes to the lacking cross-linguistic comparisons of these two languages and explores the interconnections between syntax and prosody.

On Focus and Weight in Spanish as a Heritage Language

Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2018

Previous research on heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism suggests, not without controversy, that certain properties of HSs' grammars, mainly discursive properties, can result in divergent grammatical outcomes in adulthood be it as a result of incomplete acquisition or attrition. This study contributes to this line of research by examining whether HSs' word order configurations with Spanish double object constructions reflect compliance with the pragmatic (End-Focus Principle) and syntactic related factors (End-Weight Principle) that regulate word order in Spanish. To this end, two groups of HSs with different proficiency levels in Spanish as well as a bilingual and a monolingual control group, all of Mexican origin, completed an acceptability judgment task. HSs' performance on this task shows that their knowledge of the discursive nuances associated with constituent order remains as robust as their knowledge of the syntactic factors associated with this phenomenon. Our findings therefore suggest that this linguistic domain may not be subject to so-called incomplete acquisition or L1 attrition.

Processing patterns of focusing in Spanish

Different kinds of focusing relations that encode different assumptions are expected to exhibit different kinds of processing patterns (Loureda et al. 2015, Lowder and Gordon 2015, Nadal et al. 2016). In this paper, we present findings of an eye tracking study that take under consideration two different types of focusing relations in pragmatic scales in Spanish (Rooth 1985, König 1991, Rooth 1992, Kenesei 2006, Portolés 2007, 2009): a1) unmarked identificational focus that have primarily identificational value and a2) unmarked restrictive focus that present a conceptual restriction and b) contrastive focus, marked by the focus operator incluso (even) that due to its procedural meaning restricts the inferential processes in communication (Karttunen and Peters 1979, Blakemore 1987, 1992, Portolés 2007). According to the findings, this paper claims that (1) utterances with unmarked and marked focus do not present different global processing efforts (utterances with marked focus have more encoded information but the focus operator generates a control and acceleration effect, (2) utterances with unmarked and marked foci present different intern processing patterns: unmarked (conceptual) and marked (procedural) patterns and (3) that different processing patterns lead to different inferential processes. Key words: focusing patterns, unmarked focus, marked focus, procedural meaning, focus operator, incluso, experimental pragmatics