3/4/2023 0 Comments Monolingual spanishSome, however, claim that Spanish in fact has recourse to both strategies for making the focus prominent, and some recent quantitative work has shown support for this alternative view. It is most often claimed that in Spanish constituents in narrow presentational or information focus appear rightmost, where they also receive main sentence stress, while shifting the stress to the focus in its canonical position is infelicitous. is suggests that the predictions made by the TPM do not necessarily hold for the special case of foreign language learning by heritage speakers. Based on elicited production data and a grammaticality judgment task, it is shown that the multilingual learners have only a slight advantage over the monolinguals, depending on their metalinguistic knowledge. In accordance with Rothman's (2010, 2011) Typological Primacy Model (TPM), we hypothesize that the multilingual learners behave more target-like than the monolinguals given that Italian and EP are typologically closer to Spanish than German and pattern with the target language with respect to the post-verbal position of focused subjects in sentences lacking an overt object determiner phrase (DP). Special attention is given to the position of focused subjects in non-complex declaratives. This paper investigates the acquisition of focus-induced word order variation by German learners of 元 Spanish, thereby comparing monolingual learners and multilinguals who speak Italian or European Portuguese (EP) as a heritage language in addition to their dominant language. The results of this study are relevant to future studies of focus and other information-structural phenomena, as well as to future studies of heritage grammars and language contact, and it contributes new experimental data to both fields. The second finding was also counter expectations, and thus contributes evidence toward a more fine-grained understanding of heritage grammars with regard to interface phenomena. The first finding runs contra the consensus in the literature and thus contributes to the growing challenge to this view, indicating that some common approaches to focus in Spanish may need to be rethought. The main findings of the experiment were (i) both heritage speakers and monolinguals use stress shift (1b) to realize presentational focus, and (ii) monolinguals and heritage speakers did not differ from one another. The experiment consists of a contextualized aural acceptability judgment task, in which both monolinguals and heritage speakers listened to sentences in context and judged their discourse appropriateness. It proposes an analysis of focus in Spanish in terms of conflicting constraints on well-formedness, using Optimality Theory, and then tests this analysis experimentally. This dissertation thus has the dual motivation of investigating both presentational focus in Spanish and heritage grammars. We might thus expect that monolinguals and bilinguals would realize focus differently, as with other interface phenomena, and this dissertation brings experimental evidence to bear on this question as well. One way they have been shown to differ is in phenomena regulated by the interfaces of syntax with other linguistic systems, i.e., precisely phenomena like presentational focus. The grammars of heritage speakers of Spanish (that is, U.S.-born English-dominant bilinguals) are significantly different in a number of ways from those of Spanish monolinguals. Additionally, because focus involves the complex interplay of prosody, syntax, and discourse context, it is especially of interest when considering bilingual individuals. This dissertation contributes new experimental evidence to this debate. However, some recent evidence challenges this view, claiming that stress in situ (1b) is a possible strategy for marking focus in Spanish. In Spanish, it is most commonly claimed that constituents in narrow presentational focus appear rightmost, where they also get main stress (1a), while stress in situ (1b) is infelicitous.
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