Information structure and acoustic physiognomy in equational copulative sentences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7764/onomazein.28.07Keywords:
equational sentences, focus, emphatic accentAbstract
This article presents the results of an acoustic and grammatical study of 21 equational or emphatic copulative sentences through melodic analysis (Cantero, 2002; Cantero & Font, 2009). This study was then followed by a pragmatic interpretation of the main findings in relation to their functionality as phonic correlates of the informative structure that individualizes the equational sentences as focus constructions (Gutiérrez, 1997; Cid & Maluenda, 2005; NGLE, 2009). The research was conducted under the general principles of functionalism (Silva-Corvalán, 2001; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Halliday, 2005), whereby the prosodic, syntactic and pragmatic features relieved in the analysis are considered relevant in the expression of the focuser role of the emphatic copulative sentences. The results showed a strong trend in the performance of emphatic accent in the utterance’s initial position, regardless of the focal type (contrastive or neutral) and equational type (cleft, pseudocleft and pseudocleft reverse)
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- 2013-12-31 (2)
- 2013-12-31 (1)