Prosody and focus recognition in Spanish

A fresh look at the Focus Prominence Rule

Abstract

At the interface between information structure and prosody, discourse-pragmatic categories are mapped onto prosodic structures and vice versa. The Focus Prominence Rule (FPR), which stipulates that the nuclear stress must fall within the focus domain, is considered one of the cross-linguistically most stable principles governing this mapping. However, FPR violations have received only little attention. To determine whether they occur during production or perception, we combine (i) the results of an earlier perception experiment on Argentinean Spanish showing that in about 30% of the stimuli the focus was not duly recognized and (ii) a detailed prosodic analysis of 30 lexically identical [S]-_FV-dO-iO stimuli used in that study. The following parameters are considered: first, voice quality in terms of the degree of post-focal devoicing; second, the alignment of the focal pitch accent’s high target (H) and the following low target (L), the scaling of H, and the steepness of the subsequent fall; third, the duration of the stressed syllable of the focused XP in relation to the following stressed syllable. A Relative Weight Analysis shows that duration and alignment account for 80% of variability in accuracy rate, speaking in favor of the assumption that FPR violations mainly occur in production.