Sulla realizzazione prosodica delle esclamative nominali in italiano

This study aims to investigate the prosodic organization of Italian verbless exclamatives through a spectro-acoustical analysis. The prosody of nominal exclamatives has not receiced much attention so far. They have several distinct properties: first of all, nominal exclamatives have a rigid structure: the predicate phrase and the subject must appear in this order. The absence of the copula and the anteposition of the predicate phrase give them a very marked structure. On the prosodic level, nominal exclamatives always show a falling contour. The predicative phrase, i.e. the syntactic constituent which contains the exclamative force, conveys the most prominent stress and is characterized by a salient intonation contour. The informative structure is also fixed: the predicate carries the new information, thus contrasting with the subject that is associated with the given information and melodically destressed. The presence of an intonational break contributes to separate, also on the perceptive level, the two constituents. Besides the intonation, the data collected show that pitch range, duration and intensity play a significant role in the prosodic realization of these utterances.