Yucatecan Spanish focus fronting constructions at the prosody-syntax interface

Melanie Uth
Romanisches Seminar, Universität zu Köln

This talk deals with the prosodic realization of focus fronting constructions in Yucatecan Spanish (YS). YS is the Mexican variety of Spanish spoken at the Peninsula of Yucatán. It has been in close contact with Yucatec Maya for over 500 years by now, and it has a variety of highly peculiar focus fronting constructions (cf. 1). The fronting constructions are considerable both in terms of quality (distinctness of the constructions from standard Mexican Spanish strategies of focus realization, where focus fronting is “downright ungrammatical”, Gutiérrez-Bravo 2006: 171), and in terms of their high usage frequency/habitualness. In Gutiérrez-Bravo et al. (submitted), the corresponding focus constructions are traced back to language contact with Yucatec Maya.

(1) Sólo PASEAR    haces

only take.a.walk  do.pres.2s

‘You only go WALKING AROUND.’ (Sobrino 2010: 90)

The prosodic analysis of the focus fronting constructions reveals further interesting peculiarities of YS, when compared to close-to-standard varieties of Spanish. In our elicitation data, the corresponding Intonational Phrases (IPs) generally begin with a high left edge followed by a relatively sharp downward slope. Most remarkably, the IPs do not contain any further ‘contrastive pitch accents’, as would be typical in close-to-standard varieties of Spanish. Interestingly, Yucatec Maya has recently been analyzed as an edge language (in the sense of Büring 2009), which realizes the most prominent pitch contour, in terms of pitch height, at the left of the IP (Verhoeven & Skopeteas, 2015).
In this talk, we first of all offer a prosodic analysis of the peculiar YS fronting constructions. The corresponding left edge pitch peaks will be analyzed as floating tones in the sense of Grice et al. (2009). Secondly, we dwell on the issue of the prosody-syntax-interface in YS: Since two of the most remarkable peculiarities of this variety of Spanish are (i) the increased number of fronting constructions in e.g. contrastive contexts, and (ii) the floating high tone at the left edge of IPs, it is an evident question if both phenomena are interrelated (e.g. the fronting affinity depending on the special prosodic strategy of the variety to mark the left edge of IPs with a high tone), or if we are faced with two independent characteristics.