Chapter 2. Aligning syntax and prosody in Galician

Abstract

The current chapter contributes to recent studies on the syntax and prosody of the left periphery (LP) in Romance in general and Galician in particular. The experimental data examined establish prosodic contours for six information structure contexts in Galician using the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) protocol (Cantero, 2002; Cantero & Font-Rotchés, 2009). I test the claim in e.g. Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl (2007) that left-peripheral syntactic projections each have a unique, corresponding prosodic contour, a claim based on one-to-one correspondences between pitch and information structure in Italian and German data. Findings suggest that, despite some tendencies in support of this account, certain intonation contours are used to encode more than one information structure type. The data examined militate against an isomorphic account of intonation and syntax, and instead favor a homomorphic relation between the two, thus supporting a more parsimonious view of the LP (Emonds, 2004; Kempchinsky, 2013; López, 2009).