Intonational phrasing in Romance: The role of syntactic and prosodic structure

ions, not actual phonetic events [...]. In some cases this means that conspicuous phonetic breaks occur at major constituent boundaries, but this is neither the essence of the boundary nor the only factor governing the distribution of the intonational features”.6 In this work we will not specifically tackle the issue of whether our higher level prosodic breaks are intonational phrase breaks proper (Ip) or intermediate phrase breaks (ip), though some discussion will be offered in the individual language sections.7 Speaker PG sporadically produced the whole utterance in a single prosodic phrase, probably because he was speaking somewhat faster than speaker NM.8 When branching (or double-branching) subjects were followed by double-branching objects (e.g., La boliviana de Badalona mirava la melmelada meravellosa de la Maria) we observed two possible strategies to resolve the unbalanced phrase lengths. First, the speaker produced the verb as a plateau, separating it from both the subject and the object. Second, the speaker further separated the object constituent into two prosodic phrases, separating the last prepositional phrase (e.g., (La boliviana de Badalona)(mirava la melmelada meravellosa)( de la Maria)). That is, when unbalanced (S)(VO) groupings appear, other prosodic compensation strategies emerge such as further regrouping of the [VO] constituent.9 A contrast is found between the behavior of short branching S (La nena mora) and long non-branching S (La boliviana), which contain the same number of syllables: the latter cases have a higher tendency to have (SV)(O) renderings (around a 10% increase). This effect shows that the "phonological weight" of the phrase is computed not only by looking at number of syllables but also at the number of stresses and/or prosodic words.10 However, see note 3 for a more precise syntactic analysis.