Signalling Focus in Sicilian Italian
Investigators: Elinor Payne (UCL) and Raffaella Folli (University of Ulster)
Funded by: British Academy Small Research Grant
Duration of grant : 1/3/06 - 31/12/06
Purpose of project: an experimental investigation into the intonation-syntax interface in the signalling of different types of focus in Sicilian Italian
Research Assistants : Vicky Hart and Spyros Armosti
Research Objectives:
A pressing question in current linguistic theory is how different components of language interact/interface. This project examines what happens at the intonation-syntactic interface for the phenomenon of focus in two varieties of Sicilian Italian. Sicilian Italian diverges from other varieties in that, although the default word order is VO, as in other varieties (see i), a very frequent OV order is attested when the focus falls on the object (Cruschina, 2004: 18). Cruschina argues that this holds not just for contrastive focus (iii), but also for new information focus (ii) e.g.
| i) |
VO: Ruppi a seggia – He broke the chair (answer to: What happened? ) |
| ii) |
OV: A seggia ruppi – He broke the chair (new information; answer to: What did he break? ) |
| iii) |
OV: A seggia ruppi – He broke THE CHAIR (contrastive; answer to: He broke THE TABLE? ) |
Cruschina claims that these two types are indistinguishable syntactically in Sicilian, but remain prosodically distinct (i.e. they have a different intonational contour). This study conducts a detailed instrumental analysis of these two types of focus, to establish whether such a prosodic difference actually exists, whether the difference is phonetic or phonological, whether there is a unified position for focus in Sicilian, and the degree to which pragmatic factors may be at play. Our investigation also extends to other kinds of syntactic environment, with variation on the size of the focal constituents, type of verb and an analysis of the behaviour of subjects in focus, and adds to the growing corpus of intonational research in Italo-Romance.
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