Ingo Feldhausen

Sentential Form and Prosodic Structure of Catalan

This monograph presents an experimental and theoretical inquiry into the role of sentential form and variation in the prosodic structure of Catalan. The empirical section examines intonational phrasing across sentence forms, including SVO structures with either nominal or sentential objects and structures involving clitic left- and right-dislocations. The results show variation in phrasing that depends on syntactic factors and non-syntactic factors such as topic-hood and prosodic binarity. The theoretical section uses Stochastic Optimality Theory to model the variation and frequency distributions associated with the observed prosodic patterns. Various syntactic and non-syntactic factors are represented by alignment constraints, which play a major role in Catalan, and by constraints that limit size and those that limit the overall amount of prosodic structure. This study represents a combined approach to prosody and syntax and is of particular relevance for theoretical and empirical linguists interested in the relationship between these domains both in Catalan and other languages.

Inter-speaker variation, Optimality theory, and the prosody of clitic left-dislocations in Spanish

Abstract This paper presents an empirical study on the prosody of clitic left-dislocations (CLLDs) in Spanish and offers new perspectives on how the phenomenon of inter-speaker variation in linguistic data can be integrated into formal grammatical theory. Results from a production experiment based on scripted speech show that CLLDs have an obligatory left and right boundary (typically a high edge tone at the intermediate phrase level), while other sentence-internal boundaries are subject to inter-speaker variation. The hypothesis presented here suggests that prosodic boundaries which mark information structural (IS) categories are more necessary than boundaries which satisfy alignment constraints; only the latter can show inter-speaker variation (IS-over-Alignment Hypothesis). A modified version of the Stochastic Optimality Theory (SOT) is proposed to account for the attested inter-speaker variation. By assuming that the degree of constraint overlap can vary between individual speakers while the underlying hierarchy remains invariant, the modified version of SOT is applicable beyond variation in the output structure of a whole population.

Sprachdidaktische Materialien zur Förderung der Herkunftssprache: bilingual deutsch-spanische Kinder in Deutschland

Bibliographie: Sanchez, Izarbe Garcia/Feldhausen, Ingo: Sprachdidaktische Materialien zur Forderung der Herkunftssprache: Bilingual deutsch-spanischeKinder in Deutschland, Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung, 1-2016, S. 119-130. https://doi.org/10.3224/diskurs.v11i1.22253