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8 - Focus Realization in Heritage Spanish

The Case of German-Dominant Speakers of Peninsular Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2024

By
Ingo Feldhausen  and
Maria del Mar Vanrell
Edited by
Rajiv Rao
Rajiv Rao
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

We shed light on the question of how narrow information (F) and contrastive focus (CF) are intonationally and syntactically realized by heritage speakers (HSs) of Peninsular Spanish (PS) who have German as their second L1, and compare their data to those of monolingual speakers (MSs) of PS. Results from a production experiment show clear differences between the groups with respect to preferred syntactic strategies and, consequently, the intonational realization of focal pitch accents. The preferred strategy of HSs is stress shift, followed by p-movement and simple clefts, for both focus types. Conversely, MSs mostly use different strategies for each focus type; that is, pseudo-clefts and p-movement for F, and simple clefts and focus fronting for CF. Interestingly, stress shift is not a relevant option. The attested differences support the view that the interface between discourse on one hand, and syntax and phonology on the other, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Sorace, 2011).

Keywords

focusGermanintonationPeninsular Spanishprosodysyntaxword order
Type
Chapter
Information
The Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages , pp. 166 - 189
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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