Prominence marking and language contact in Spanish (A05)

• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281511265

The basic goal of the project is to determine the most important prominence marking strategies in Yucatecan Spanish against the background of the variety’s longstanding and ongoing contact with Yucatec Maya. The project addresses “structural prominence marking”, i.e. structural constraints on phrasing and accentuation, as well as “pragmatic prominence marking” destined to highlight particular constituents for pragmatic reasons. The central aim of the current project phase is to compare the structural and pragmatic prominence marking properties of YS, YM, and standard Mexican Spanish by means of cross-linguistic comparison of production data and acceptability judgments. In later stages, we will also deal with loan word prosody and perception data, and we aim at elaborating a contact model which is appropriate to account for the exaptation and/or grammaticalization of prosodic features.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1252: Prominence in Language
• Applicant Institution: Universität zu Köln
• Project Head: Professorin Dr. Melanie Uth