The present study aims to explore the prosodic properties of Italian verbless exclamatives (VE), particular sentence structures without wh-quantifier and copula. A speech controlled corpus formed by 250 VEs uttered by five subjects of a Southern variety of Italian was analyzed. The experimental results proved that VEs have a marked prosodic structure constituted by two opposed constituents. The preposed predicative phrase is characterized by a salient intonation contour, while the grammatical subject is marginalized and shows a monotonous f0 pattern. The information structure is fixed too: the predicative constituent carries the new information, thus contrasting with the subject that expresses a given content
The intonation of Italian verbless exclamatives
Patrizia Sorianello
Writing – Original Draft Preparation
2020-01-01
Abstract
The present study aims to explore the prosodic properties of Italian verbless exclamatives (VE), particular sentence structures without wh-quantifier and copula. A speech controlled corpus formed by 250 VEs uttered by five subjects of a Southern variety of Italian was analyzed. The experimental results proved that VEs have a marked prosodic structure constituted by two opposed constituents. The preposed predicative phrase is characterized by a salient intonation contour, while the grammatical subject is marginalized and shows a monotonous f0 pattern. The information structure is fixed too: the predicative constituent carries the new information, thus contrasting with the subject that expresses a given contentI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
