The Realization of Focus in Asturian Spanish

Abstract

Spanish was classified as a language that only exploits syntactic mechanisms to mark focus. Recent experimental studies, nonetheless, have shown that speakers of different dialects are also able to use prosody to different degrees. This study aims to provide further understanding on the role played by prosody in the realization of focus in Spanish by looking at Asturian Spanish, a dialect in contact with another Romance language, Asturian. The data from a contextualized sentence completion task revealed that a phonological distinction between specific pitch categories (L+<H* vs. L+H*) cannot be established in this dialect, at least for the types of focus being elicited (i.e., informational/non-corrective vs. contrastive/corrective). Nonetheless, it also showed that speakers exploit different prosodic features (i.e., pitch range, alignment, and duration) to mark focus constituents, although their use differs as a result of that constituents’ function. These findings provide further support for the consideration of languages and specific dialects in a continuum based on the degree to which they use prosody to mark focus and to explore more in detail the phonetic implementation of focal accents.