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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2011

Phrasing, register level downstep and partial topic constructions in Neapolitan Italian

Résumé

In this paper, we analyze data from Neapolitan Italian showing that register subordination within a prosodic phrase is function of information structure. Specifically, we hypothesized that in an SN VP structure, the register level of the separately phrased VP would be lowered when it is coextensive with a focus constituent immediately following a partial topic phrase. We also show that in Italian, topics are not always separated from the rest of the utterance by a phrase break, since only partial (contrastive) topic constructions (while this was not the case for familiar or non-contrastive topics) were characterized by two prosodic phrases. In fact, when the phrase break is not present (i.e., when a default topic phrase is present), the pitch accent associated with a non-initial VP is always higher than when following a partial topic phrase. We also show here that this type of register subordination is not to be confused with the extreme register compression effect caused by early, contrastive focus (on the sentence-initial NP). Both partial topic and contrastive focus on a subject NP appear to induce a phrase break after this constituent.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-01482601 , version 1 (03-03-2017)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01482601 , version 1

Citer

Mariapaola d'Imperio, Francesco Cangemi. Phrasing, register level downstep and partial topic constructions in Neapolitan Italian. C. Gabriel And C. Lléo. Hamburger Studies on Multilingualism, 10, John Benjamins, 2011, 1571-4934. ⟨hal-01482601⟩
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