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In:Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields
Edited by Meghan E. Armstrong, Nicholas Henriksen and Maria del Mar Vanrell
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 6] 2016
► pp. 153–180

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The Relation between Prosody and Syntax: The case of different types of Left-Dislocations in Spanish

 | Goethe-Universität Frankfurt & UMR 7018-Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, Paris 3
Published online: 31 March 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.6.08fel
This paper sheds new light on the validity of claims in the syntactic literature concerning the prosody of (a) hanging topic left-dislocations (HTLDs), (b) clitic left-dislocations (CLLDs) and (c) left-dislocations without a resumptive pronoun in Spanish. It is typically assumed that HTLDs but not CLLDs are obligatorily marked by a pause. However, the results of a production experiment show that these constructions have similar intonational patterns. LDs are tonally realized by a rising nuclear configuration and may be followed by a pause (more often in HTLDs than in the other constructions, however). A sharp contrast exists between HTLDs in interrogatives and declaratives; only the former are obligatorily realized with a pause and may have a low edge tone.
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