The intonation of Italian verbless exclamatives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0049/000464Keywords:
intonation, verbless exclamatives, Italian languageAbstract
The present study aims to explore the prosodic properties of Italian verbless exclamatives (VEs), particular sentence structures without wh-quantifier and copula. A speech corpus formed by 250 VEs uttered by five subjects of a Southern variety of Italian was analyzed. The experimental results proved that VEs have a marked prosodic structure typically made up by two opposed constituents. The preposed predicative phrase is characterized by a salient intonation contour, while the grammatical subject is marginalized and shows a monotonous f0 pattern. The information structure is fixed too: the predicative constituent carries the new information, thus contrasting with the subject that expresses a given content.
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