Search

Copyright of Revista Signos is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is based on the idea that the study of peripheral phenomena or marginalia in language can shed new light on the interpretation of other, less marginal linguistic data. Specifically, it focuses on the joining or separation of linguistic elements, which is often considered a typically marginal phenomenon, but which constitutes one of the syntactic criteria for classifying verbal periphrases. For this purpose, interpolation, i.e. the separation of the two components of a periphrasis by another element, is examined in three specific cases: , and . The analysis offers clues for reconsidering interpolation as a criterion for the classification of periphrases. At the same time, the study makes it clear that, on the one hand, verbal periphrases are characterised by a type of syntactic ambiguity and, on the other hand, their semantic value is decisive in determining their periphrastic nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguous relative clauses with two possible antecedent nouns have been widely studied in Spanish since they cast doubt on the universality of syntactic parsing principles. Current research suggests that there is an early contribution of prosodic information in the disambiguation of this kind or sentences in oral comprehension and production tasks. In this paper we present two comprehension experiments of locally ambiguous relative clauses with two possible attachment sites in Spanish, in which different prosodic parameters were manipulated to yield either congruous or incongruous pairings of prosody and syntax, with the aim of testing their influence on listeners' attachment preferences of the ambiguous clause and on their response times. Additionally, fundamental frequency (F0) and temporal (pause distribution) prosodic parameters were manipulated in different subexperiments so as to assess their separate contribution to participants' performance. Our results confirm an effective and relatively early use of prosodic information by listeners during language processing. In particular, congruous prosody with syntax generally facilitates participants' responses, though this effect was found to vary across the two attachment options. Finally, F0 and temporal prosodic features were found to make a similar contribution to participants' responses, with few occasional differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of LINRED. Linguistica en la Red is the property of Universidad de Alcala. UAH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Investigación Lingüística is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Prosodic and syntactic structures correspond to different levels of analysis of language; however, there is a relation between them that constitutes a powerful tool when facing syntactically ambiguous sentences (Price et al. 1991:1). Robust evidence has been found in Spanish of the preference for high attachment of the relative clause in syntactically ambiguous sentences. Most of the research concerning the topic has focused on finding out how people disambiguate these sentences when reading in silence with on-line or off-line tasks and how the working memory operates in doing so. Few researchers have incorporated the study of the underlying melody patterns in this type of sentence. The present research describes the underlying prosodic pattern of ambiguous sentences with high attachment of relative clause produced by native speakers of Spanish from Concepcion. The recorded utterances were labeled using the ToBI system and submitted to perceptual judgment to confirm the prosodic pattern of preference for high-attachment of the relative clause as the phonetic-phonologic support that aids listeners to disambiguate this type of sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]