Local intonational marking of Spanish contrastive focus

Abstract

The majority of studies on Spanish focus have dealt with the way word order is used to convey focus. Recent studies have shown that prosody is also used in marking Spanish focus, though the role of intonation has not been extensively investigated. This paper examines the ways in which intonation is used locally at the focal word to mark contrastive focus in Spanish. It is shown that there are four different intonational patterns that are used in the local marking of contrastive focus, including three patterns differing phonologically from broad focus utterances and one differing phonetically. The phonological marking of focus through intonation involves the use of a focal pitch accent and intermediate phrase boundary tones, while the phonetic marking involves the use of an expanded pitch range. © 2002, by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved.