Dia: dijous 9 de juny del 2022

Hora: 12.00 h

Lloc: sala de reunions 52.737 - 7a planta edifici 52. Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou - UPF
 

Nota: tenim també la presentacio per zoom, els que vulguin participar poden escriure per aconseguir el link a:

 [email protected] i a [email protected]

Resum:

The realization of information focus in Catalan and Spanish has been the object of considerable debate in the literature. While, based on introspection, most scholars claim that information focus, including subjects, must appear at the end of the sentence, others have questioned this claim on the basis of experimental data, arguing that information focus can occur preverbally, especially in the case of focal subjects. These experimental studies, however, are not free from criticism, in that the adopted elicitation technique often forces participants to produce a full sentence as an answer to a question in a context in which the most natural answer would have been a focal fragment. In this talk, we will present two experiments (a production task and an acceptability judgment task) in which the stimuli were designed so that participants would spontaneously utter a full sentence instead of a fragment, without being explicitly instructed to do so. In the production task, participants in both the Catalan and Spanish versions of the experiment overwhelmingly produced postverbal foci both with subjects and with objects, along with a marginal number of preverbal and clefted foci. The acceptability judgment task confirmed that postverbal focus is always preferred over preverbal focus. However, a focal interpretation of preverbal subjects cannot be totally excluded, particularly in Spanish. We interpret this cross-linguistic difference in the light of the hypothesis formulated in Leonetti (2017), according to which Catalan is more restrictive than Spanish with respect to the mapping between syntax and information structure.