Fronted nuclei: narrow focus in Spanish and English

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to show that fronted nuclei, if not as abundant as in English, do nevertheless, along with other means of highlighting, play a significant role in Spanish intonation. Although the overriding tendency in Spanish is for right-edged tonicity, it would appear that nucleus fronting is common in Spanish in cases of strong contrast and anaphora, in highly emotional contexts (amazement, incredulity, impatience, exasperation, etc.), when there are interjections in final position (por favor 'please', gracias 'thank you), when there are nominal proforms after the verb whose identity is taken for granted, and in the case of words whose meaning is implicitly emphatic, rendering them likely to attract the focus (odiar 'to hate', todo 'all', mismo ' self', también 'also', tampoco 'neither', único 'only', es igual 'it's all the same', and deictics, like the demonstrative pronouns, éste, ésa 'this, that, etc.'). Keywords: prosody, tonicity, nucleus placement, Spanish and English sentence stress, fronted sentence stress.