Abstract
The paper presents an information structure (IS) analysis of YNQ contours of nine Romance languages from a psycholinguistic perspective. The contours are presented in Frota & Prieto (2015). The psychological IS model defines four IS categories for describing IS partitions of information units and rules for the nuclear stress identification. Information units are contrast units (CUs) generated by the speech production mechanism at the cortex level in order to pair words/word groups within speech data flow. The contrast is an IS functional one at the information packaging level and is conveyed at the prosodic level by contrasted tonal features of IS functional elements. CU_predicate-CU_argument and CU_theme-CU_rheme are the two structural dimensions of IS partitions. The model formulates two IS-based nuclear stress rules that we have used in Romance YNQ contour analysis in order to identify nucleus (focus) of IS partitions that is an important factor to discriminate between different contour types: information seeking YNQ, confirmation seeking YNQ, or echo YNQ within the nine Romance languages.
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