Prominence Shifts in English and Spanish Parallel Constructions

Jeffrey KlassenMcGill University

1085 Doctor Penfield AvenueMontreal, QC

Michael WagnerMcGill University

Heather GoadMcGill University

Contact: jeffrey.klassen@mail.mcgill.ca

Annie TremblayUniversity of Kansas

1541 Lilac LaneLawrence, KS

Abstract

Certain information theoretical distinc-tions that are encoded by prosody in En-glish are encoded by word order in Span-ish (Bolinger, 1954), a fact often re-lated to the freer word order in Spanish(Lambrecht, 1994; Buring, 2010). Thisstudy reports on a production experimentthat compares whether and how the twolanguages mark focus in cases of paral-lelism, where a change in word order isnot an option in Spanish. Prior studieshave claimed that Spanish marks focusprosodically only if the focus involved is‘contrastive’ or ‘corrective’ (Zubizarreta,1998), whereas English marks all typesof focus prosodically. Our production re-sults are compatible with this claim, butwe offer another interpretation of the re-sults: That the focus operator involved inprosodic focus marking in Spanish neces-sarily has to take scope over the entire rootclause (speech act), while in English it cantake scope over a broader range of con-stituents.

1 Focus-Driven Shifts in SententialProminence

The pattern of prosodic prominence of utterancesin which all encoded information is new and noconstituent is construed as being contrastive is of-ten viewed as the ‘default’ prosodic pattern. InEnglish, the typical default prosodic pattern formost sentences involves a pitch accent on the lastconstituent (Chomsky and Halle, 1968; Cinque,1993), and in Spanish this is even more likely tobe the case (Ladd, 1990; Zubizarreta, 1998; Ladd,2008; Buring, 2010). Examples of the defaultstress pattern in each language are illustrated in

examples (1) and (2).

(1) A: What kept you up last night?B: [A woman was SINGING]F

(2) A: ¿Que te mantenıa despierto anoche?B: [Alguna mujer CANTO]F

The final stressed syllable of the final sententialconstituent is likely to be perceived as the mostprominent syllable of the sentence, often referredto as its ‘nuclear stress’. Sometimes, the mainprominence is placed on a constituent other theone which would be expected to carry it by de-fault. Such ‘prominence shifts’ encode what infor-mation is contextually given and what informationis ‘focused’ or ‘contrastive’. An example is givenin (3):

(3) A: Who was singing last night in thestreet?

B: [A WOMAN]F was singing.

Contextually motivated shifts in sentential promi-nence are argued by Rooth (1992) to reflect the al-ternatives to an utterance that are relevant in thecurrent context. In Rooth’s theory, every con-stituent comes with a set of alternatives, its ‘focussemantic value,’ in addition to its regular denota-tion. When there is an antecedent for focus mark-ing, prominence falls on those constituents that aresubstituted in the antecedent, and is shifted awayfrom constituents that are the same. In the presentcase, the question serves as the antecedent, and therelevant alternatives to B’s utterance are all of theform x was singing. Hence prominence is shiftedaway from from the predicate and placed on thesubject by leaving the VP unaccented and/or byboosting the prominence on the subject (Breen etal., 2010).

It has long been noted that the mark-ing of focus differs between English and

Appears in JerSem: The 20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, edited by Julie Hunter, Mandy Simons and Matthew Stone. New Brunswick, NJ USA, July 16-18, 2016, pages 76-85.

Spanish (Bolinger, 1954), and more gener-ally between Germanic and Romance languages(Vallduvı, 1993; Lambrecht, 1994). One differ-ence between focus-marking in English and Span-ish is that Spanish makes use of certain word or-ders to mark focus that are not allowed in En-glish. As has been described by many researchers(Bolinger, 1954; Lambrecht, 1994; Zubizarreta,1998; Lozano, 2006; Buring, 2010; Hualde etal., 2012; Domınguez, 2013, i.a.), given or topi-cal constituents are often placed earlier in an ut-terance, and new or focused constituents are oftenplaced in the more prominent, sentence-final po-sition. Under this view, a leftward shift in promi-nence, as was seen in English in (3), is not permit-ted, or at least not preferred when an alternativesyntactic strategy is available:

(4) SpanishA: ¿Quien canto anoche en la calle?

“Who sang last night in the street?”B: #[Alguna

aMUJER]Fwoman

cantosang

B′: Cantosang

[algunaa

MUJER]Fwoman

“A woman sang.”

Sometimes, however, prominence does shift evenin Spanish. One instance are corrective utterances(Zubizarreta, 1998):

(5) A: Algun hombre canto anoche en lacalle.“A man sang in the street last night.”

B: No,no

[algunaa

MUJER]Fwoman

canto.sang

B′: #No,no

cantosang

[algunaa

MUJER]F .woman

“No, a WOMAN sang.”

One conclusion often drawn is that Spanish marksfocus prosodically only in corrective utterances,while in English, focus is marked prosodically in agreater range of circumstances (Zubizarreta, 1998;Ladd, 2008). In fact, Zubizarreta (1998), Lopez(2009), Buring (2010), and others have claimedthat syntactic ways to mark focus trade off withprosodic means of focus marking, a claim that isused to explain the prosodic differences betweenEnglish and Spanish.

The evidence in the literature for this interac-tion between focus type and prosodic markinghas mostly been based on impressionistic observa-

tions. The only experimental study that we knowof that directly compared English and Spanishwith respect to their prosodic marking of differ-ent types of focus is Cruttenden (2006). Crutten-den looked at 10 different dialogues in a range oftypologically different languages. Although Crut-tenden does not identify the types of focus in eachof the dialogues, two of the dialogues arguably doinvolve a corrective response (dialogue 5 and dia-logue 7), of which one example is the following:

(6) a. A: I did all the work.B: You mean your SISTER did all

the work.b. A: Yo

Ihizodid

todoall

elthe

trabajo.work

B: Loit

quethat

quiereswant

decirsay

esis

quethat

tuyour

hermanasister

hizodid

todoall

elthe

TRABAJO.work

Cruttenden found that in contrast to English,where 7 out of 7 speakers shifted prominence tosister in (6), 0 out of the 4 Spanish speakers shiftedprominence to hermana, all instead re-accentingtrabajo.1 For the second corrective dialogue (notshown), again 0 out of 4 of the Spanish speakersshowed a prominence shift.

Cruttenden’s results therefore seem to contra-dict commonly held assumptions that Spanishshifts prominence for corrective focus. However,Cruttenden’s experiment is based on a few isolatedsentences (for example, only 2 dialogues that onecould plausibly call ‘corrective’ per speaker), withfew speakers (only four speakers in Spanish). Amore detailed comparison of focus marking in En-glish and Spanish is clearly needed, with a largersampling of participants and more carefully con-trolled stimuli.

2 Prominence Shifts Under Parallelism

In constructions involving series of parallel lin-guistic constructions, contrastive intonation is nec-essary in English (Chomsky, 1971):

(7) John is neither EASY to please, nor EA-1There are inconsistencies in Cruttenden’s reporting of

the results. The table of results (p.319) reports 1 out of 4Spanish speakers shifting prominence in (6), whereas withinthe text (p.324) it is reported that “all four Spanish speakersre-accented trabajo.” Additionally, the table of results reportsthat 7 out of 7 speakers re-accented work in the English di-alogue, while it is clear within the text that this must be amistake, and instead it must be that 7 out of 7 English speak-ers accented sister and de-accented work.

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GER to please, nor CERTAIN to please,nor INCLINED to please, nor HAPPY toplease, ...

Rooth (1992) analyzes this type of prosodic mark-ing of contrast as an anaphoric phenomenon, sim-ilar to the use of pronouns. Prominence shifts likethose observed in (7) require an appropriate an-tecedent. He introduces the presuppositional focusoperator∼. The operator∼ introduces the presup-position that there is an antecedent similar to theconstituent that ∼ attaches to (the ‘scope’ of ∼).The antecedent has to be identical, except that anyF-marked constituent contained in the scope of ∼(its ‘focus’, or ‘foci’ if there are multiple) has tobe non-identical at least in one alternative. Underthis theory, the focus structure for (7) is analyzedas follows:

(8) John is neither ∼[EASYF to please], nor∼[EAGERF to please], nor∼[CERTAINF

to please], nor ∼[INCLINEDF to please],nor ∼[HAPPYF to please], ...

Usually, the antecedent for prosodic focus mark-ing precedes the anaphor, as in (3), where thequestion in the context serves as the antecedentfor the answer. But in cases of parallelism as in(8), a prominence shift is possible even in the firstoccurrence of the parallel structure, in which caseprosodic focus marking is cataphoric rather thananaphoric. Put simply, the first instance of focusmarking in (8) leaves the listener hanging: It setsup a contrast that requires an postcedent that hasnot been realized yet. A listener might use this in-formation and expect a parallel structure to be im-minent. Another way of thinking about cataphorais that the listener has to accommodate a prior(unmentioned) antecedent, to which all instancesof the parallel structure are anaphoric (Williams,1997). The exact conditions governing cataphoricprominence shifts are not yet known: Authorssuch as Rooth (1992) have provided the intuitionthat a shift in prominence within the first paral-lel constituent (e.g. easy in (8)) is optional En-glish, which would make sense because it requiresa level of foresight when planning the utterancethat may not always be possible. Cataphoric focusmarking requires a greater amount of look-ahead,and therefore its optionality might be due to limitson production planning.

The intuition sometimes reported for Romance

languages is that there is no shift in prominencein cases of parallelism (Ladd, 1990; Ladd, 2008;Bocci, 2013). Vander Klok et al. (2014) pro-vide experimental evidence that this is correct atleast for French—note that French, unlike Span-ish, does not employ the focus-driven changes inword order seen in (4).

The case of parallelism is particularly interest-ing because it provides an opportunity to constrainthe scope of∼ in order to observe how its scope af-fects prosodic focus marking. We use this methodin the present study to test whether Spanish markscorrective focus differently from other types of fo-cus. Consider the three cases of parallelism in En-glish below:

(9) a. Move ∼[angelF number two] to∼[donkeyF number two].

b. ∼[Click angelF number two]. Then∼[click donkeyF number two].

c. ∼[Don’t click angelF number two.]∼[Click donkeyF number two].

One characterization of the relevant differencesbetween the three cases is that only the last ex-ample in (9-c) is ‘corrective,’ while the other twocases are merely ‘contrastive’. Uses of focus canmore generally be distinguished by their prag-matic function, and focus is often classified intodifferent ‘types of focus’ along those lines. How-ever, there is another way to characterize the dis-tinctions in (9): They differ in the scope of ∼; thatis, they differ in the the attachment height of ∼(Vander Klok et al., 2014). Since each of the twoparallel constituents has to serve as an antecedentfor the focus marking of the other, the scope of∼ is constrained and cannot be so wide that bothparallel constituents fall within the constituent that∼ attaches to. This means that in (9-a), the scopeof ∼ cannot be wider than the NPs, and each fo-cus operator has to attach to a separate individual-denoting NP within a single clause. In (9-b) and(9-c), ∼ cannot span both sentences, but ∼ can at-tach to nodes bigger than the individual NPs, thatdenote entire propositions. In the last example in(9-c), ∼ can attach to constituents that correspondto separate imperative speech acts.

If Spanish marks only corrective focus prosodi-cally, we would expect focus marking only to bepossible in the Spanish equivalent of (9-c). Inthis case, we could also characterize Spanish asrestricting the scope of ∼ to constituents that de-

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note entire speech acts (in an alternative terminol-ogy, we could refer to such constituents as “rootclauses,” where the root corresponds to a syntac-tic node used in a particular speech act). We referto this as the “Corrective” or “Speech act scope”hypothesis:

(10) Spanish: Corrective Hypothesis(or: Speech act scope) – see (9) for trans-lationa. Ponga el angel numero dos en el

burro numero dos.b. Haga clic en el angel numero dos.

Despues haga clic en el burronumero dos.

c. No∼[haga clic en el angelF numerodos.] ∼[Haga clic en el burroFnumero dos.]

Another possibility, however, is that Spanishalso allows for a prominence shift in cases like(10-b), where ∼ can scope over constituents thatdenote propositions. Under this view, Spanishrestricts ∼ to clausal scope. This is compatiblewith the claim that certain Romance languages donot allow multiple focus operators within a singleclause (Calabrese, 1987; Stoyanova, 2008; Bocci,2013). Then, English and Spanish should patternsimilarly with respect to (10-b) and (10-c), shift-ing prominence where the two focus operators in-volved are in separate clauses. In (10-a), wheretwo focus operators within a single clause are nec-essary in order to mark parallelism, prosodic fo-cus marking should still be impossible in Span-ish. This so-called “Propositional Scope” hypoth-esis therefore generates different predictions fromthe “Speech Act Scope” or “Corrective” hypothe-sis, the predictions of which which are illustratedin (10).

By comparing the realization of the three sen-tence types in (9) and (10), we can gain novel in-sights into the grammatical underpinnings of thedifferences and provide the first systematic exper-imental evidence of these claimed differences. Atthe same time, this comparison will serve as a testfor the more basic claim, assumed by many pre-vious authors, that Spanish reliably marks correc-tive focus as in (10-c) but not does not mark paral-lelism in cases like (10-b).

3 Materials

We designed our materials to test focus at threedifferent levels with respect to the syntactic scopeof the focus operator involved: Two parallel DPswithin a single clause (“sub-clausal,” as in (9-a)and (10-a)), two parallel clauses (“clausal,” asin (9-b) and (10-b)), and two parallel speechacts, where the second corrects the first (“super-clausal,” as in (9-c) and (10-c)). Within each typeof parallelism, we controlled whether the first,the second, or both constituents were contrasted.For example, when the first constituent was con-trasted, the head nouns would be in focus (e.g.Move [angel]F number two to [donkey]F numbertwo). When the second was contrasted, the num-ber modifiers would be in focus (e.g. Move an-gel [number two]F to angel [number three]F ). Fi-nally, when both contrasted, the phrase containedtwo foci, on both the head noun and the modifier(e.g Move [angel]F [number two]F to [donkey]F[number three]F ). This resulted in a total of 9conditions. An example set of 9 stimuli is sum-marized in Table 1 for English and in Table 2 forSpanish. We created 72 object-number combina-tions for each language (each with 2 objects ∗ 2numbers), each with 9 variants (according to the 9conditions; i.e. 72 ∗ 9 items per language).

The experiment was run in a Latin square de-sign, where each participant only saw one con-dition from each object-number combination, butan equal number of 8 trials from each conditionacross the experiment. The items were presentedin random order. The objects were chosen to berelatively high frequency nouns referring to con-crete, easily illustratable objects like animals, arti-cles of clothing and food items. They consisted ofonly disyllabic trochees in both Spanish and En-glish. The numbers two, three and six (dos, tresand seis) were used because they are monosyllabicin both languages. Number modifiers (“numbertwo”, “number three”) were used because they arepostnominal in both English and Spanish.2

2Many previous studies of prosodic focus make use ofnoun-adjective combinations (Swerts et al., 2002; Hamlaouiet al., 2012), which somewhat limits crosslinguistic compar-isons between Germanic and Romance languages: Germanicadjectives usually precede the noun while in Romance, theopposite is true. Using a modifier that is postnominal in bothlanguages allowed us to control for potential effects of thesyntax on prominence. Vander Klok et al. (2014), however,report experimental evidence suggesting that whether an ad-jectival modifier is prenominal or postnominal does not alterwhether a prominence shift with an NP is possible or not.

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Sub-clausal ScopeHead Noun Move angel number two to donkey number

two.Modifier Move angel number two to angel number

three.Both Move angel number two to donkey number

three.

Clausal ScopeHead Noun Click angel number two. Then click don-

key number two.Modifier Click angel number two. Then click angel

number three.Both Click angel number two. Then click don-

key number three.

Super-clausal ScopeHead Noun Don’t click angel number two. Click don-

key number two.Modifier Don’t click angel number two. Click angel

number three.Both Don’t click angel number two. Click don-

key number three.

Table 1: English production task conditions

Sub-clausal ScopeHead Noun Ponga el angel numero dos en el burro

numero dos.Modifier Ponga el angel numero dos en el angel

numero tres.Both Ponga el angel numero dos en el burro

numero tres.

Clausal ScopeHead Noun Haga clic en el angel numero dos. Despues

haga clic en el burro numero dos.Modifier Haga clic en el angel numero dos. Despues

haga clic en el angel numero tres.Both Haga clic en el angel numero dos. Despues

haga clic en el burro numero tres.

Super-clausal ScopeHead Noun No haga clic en el angel numero dos. Haga

clic en el burro numero dos.Modifier No haga clic en el angel numero dos. Haga

clic en el angel numero tres.Both No haga clic en el angel numero dos. Haga

clic en el burro numero tres.

Table 2: Spanish production task conditions

4 Research Questions and Predictions

Our first research question was whether the twolanguages mark focus prosodically in the finalconstituent (which we will call “NP2”), and ifthis would occur in all types of contexts. TheSpeech Act Scope hypothesis (and Corrective hy-pothesis) predict that prominence shifts in Spanishshould occur only within the Super-clausal condi-tion, while a Propositional Scope approach wouldpredict prominence in Spanish to be shifted inboth the Clausal and Super-clausal conditions. Asecond research question relates to the markingof cataphoric (anticipatory) focus in English andSpanish (within “NP1”), in order to see whether

speakers of English or Spanish would ever shiftprominence in anticipation of the upcoming con-stituent. We predicted prominence shifts to be lessfrequent in NP1 than in NP2 because of its op-tional nature (possibly due to limits in look-aheadwhen planning an utterance).

5 Procedures

Participants were recorded with the use of a dig-ital head-mounted microphone. The participantsat in front of one computer screen and the ex-perimenter sat at a second screen that was turnedaway from the participant at a perpendicular angle.The participant was required to instruct the ex-perimenter to move or click images on the screenbased on different symbols that appeared with theimages. The experimenter performed the instruc-tions on their own screen. Before the experi-mental trials, the participants practiced each typeof instruction by running through a block of 9practice trials. The practice block was repeatedas needed to ensure that the participant gave thecorrect instruction corresponding to the symbolon the screen. The three types of instructionswere “Move,” which was indicated with an arrow(Figure 1), “Click...then, click,” which was indi-cated with two green squares and an arrow (Figure2), and “Don’t click...click,” which was indicatedwith a red square and a green square (Figure 3).

Figure 1: Visual Array – “Move angel number twoto donkey number two.”

The participant was told that the experimentercould not see the instructive symbols so that theywould think that the verbal instructions were theonly information available to the experimenter.In reality, both screens were completely synchro-nized, and the experimenter performed the moves

80

Figure 2: Visual Array – “Click angel number two.Then, click angel number three.”

Figure 3: Visual Array – “Don’t click angel num-ber two. Click donkey number three.”

as instructed, simply pretending to not know eachmove. During the experiment, each visual arraywas presented for 4 seconds before the appear-ance of the symbols in order for the participant tohave enough time to activate the name of the ob-jects on the screen. Once the symbols appeared,the recording began: The participant formed theirutterance based on the symbols, and the experi-menter gave verbal confirmation to continue oncethey had carried out the move.

6 Participants

Two groups of participants were recruited: a groupof 16 North American English native speakers (10female, born in USA and Canada3) and a groupof 17 native speakers of Spanish (14 female) from

3One native English speaker was born in the United King-dom but moved to the US at a young age and spoke with aNorth American accent.

Latin American countries.4 Of the 17 Spanishspeakers, 9 were born in Colombia, 3 were bornin Mexico, 2 were born in Venezuela, and 1 eachwas born in Chile, Cuba, and the Dominican Re-public.

Because they were concurrently participatingin a second language study, all participants wereSpanish-English bilingual to a limited extent:Both native speaker groups scored at an inter-mediate level of proficiency in their second lan-guage. In addition, participants were not excludedif they had knowledge of a third language (mostcommonly, French), but such participants were in-cluded in the study only if their third language wasreported to be less dominant and less proficientthan both Spanish and English.5

7 Data Analysis

Data were coded for prominence impressionisti-cally by two trained annotators. A research as-sistant whose native language was English codedthe English data and the first author, who is alsoan English native speaker, coded the Spanish data.For each recorded item, the annotator listened andnoted whether the main stress of the phrase hadbeen shifted leftward to the head noun (promi-nence shift) or if it remained in the default right-most position (no prominence shift). Acousticmeasures were extracted and the prominence an-notations were validated by measuring the corre-lation between the annotations and the acousticmeasures by means of a logistic regression: Itemsmarked as “prominence shift” consistently showeda larger difference in prominence between thehead noun and the modifier (relative prominence).In NP1, pitch and duration predicted prominence,and in NP2, intensity and duration were the signif-icant predictors. Both languages were pooled to-gether in the regression, and language did not leadto a significant interaction when included in themodel (and therefore was excluded). The results

4Argentinean Spanish speakers were excluded since thedialect is known to differ greatly from other dialects of theAmericas, particularly with respect to information structuralcomponents (Gabriel, 2010).

5Language status was determined by means of a languagebackground questionnaire that asked participants to reporttheir proficiency in each language they knew, and asked aboutthe amount of exposure they received from each languagethroughout all stages of infancy to late adolescence. All par-ticipants lived in an English-speaking country at the time ofthe study. All Spanish native speakers had arrived in theEnglish-speaking country during adulthood (mean age of ar-rival: 26.18 years).

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of these models are shown in Table 3.It must be acknowledged that using impression-

istic annotations from a single rater in each lan-guage is less than ideal, as is using non-nativespeakers to annotate their non-native language. Itis therefore clear that additional analyses (a sec-ond annotator in English in order to establish inter-rater reliability, use of two Spanish native speakersfor Spanish) are indeed necessary. In addition tothis, the annotators could not be completely blindto the initial conditions because the sentence typeswere apparent upon listening. In future analyses,we will employ annotators who are blind to theexperimental hypotheses.

NP1 NP2Coeff (SE) Coeff (SE)

(Intercept) −3.65 (0.24)∗∗∗ −1.46 (0.18)∗∗∗

Intensity 0.14 (0.08) 0.15 (0.05)∗∗

Pitch 0.34 (0.09)∗∗∗ −0.04 (0.05)Duration 0.55 (0.11)∗∗∗ 0.39 (0.06)∗∗∗

∗∗∗p < 0.001, ∗∗p < 0.01, ∗p < 0.05

Table 3: Acoustic Predictors of Annotations

Despite the issues arising from employing im-pressionistic prominence annotations, we do notdirectly report on the raw acoustic measures be-cause it is often the case that with acoustic promi-nence, several acoustic variables work togetherin a dependent fashion. For example, Breenet al. (2010) showed that relative intensity, du-ration and pitch worked additively to determinewhether prominence had been perceived to havebeen shifted: One, two or all three cues may bepresent, but it is difficult to predict the exact mix-tures required. The percept of relative prominencehas been argued to be more robust than acous-tic measures, and in general leads to high inter-annotator reliability (Klassen and Wagner, 2016).

Finally, given the results of the logistic regres-sion in Table 3, it could very well be the case thatcataphoric focus is marked using different combi-nations of cues in relation to those used in focusmarking for the second constituent, as argued forexample in (Rooth, 2015); this would need to beinvestigated in further research.

8 Results

8.1 Anaphoric FocusWe first look at the prosodic realization of the sec-ond constituent, that is, the case of anaphoric (as

opposed to cataphoric) focus marking. As seenin Figure 4, English speakers shifted stress to thehead noun of NP2 in the Head Noun condition in92-93% of the trials, whereas they rarely shiftedprominence in cases where the modifier was notgiven (Both and Modifier conditions). Scope wasnot a significant factor in determining prominenceshift in English.

English Spanish

0.29

0.92

0.04

0.28

0.93

0.03

0.39

0.93

0.05

0.01 0.15 0.01

0.00 0.20 0.01

0.020.37

0.00

0.000.250.500.751.00

0.000.250.500.751.00

0.000.250.500.751.00

Sub

Clause

Super

Both Head Noun Modifier Both Head Noun ModifierPro

min

ence

Shi

fts to

Hea

d N

oun

Figure 4: Prominence annotations for NP2(Anaphoric focus)

Coeff (SE)(Intercept) −1.46 (0.11)∗∗∗

scope1 (Super vs. other) 0.52 (0.15)∗∗∗

scope2 (Clause vs. Sub) −0.23 (0.21)language 2.26 (0.22)∗∗∗

scope1:language −0.61 (0.29)∗

scope2:language 0.34 (0.42)∗∗∗p < 0.001, ∗∗p < 0.01, ∗p < 0.05

Table 4: Generalized linear mixed model- Anaphoric Focus. Formula: Annotation∼ scope ∗ language + (1|participant) +(0+scope|participant) + (0+scope|item)

Overall, Spanish speakers shifted prominenceless frequently than what was seen for Englishspeakers. As seen in Figure 4, Spanish speakersshifted prominence to the head noun within theHead Noun condition in only 20-37% of the tri-als, depending on the level of scope of the focusoperator.

We tested for the significance of the observeddifferences using a logistic mixed-effects regres-sion, outlined in Table 4. Our model includedScope and Language and their interaction as fixedeffects, and random effects for by-item and by-participant differences. The random effects in-cluded slopes for the two fixed effects and their in-teraction. The three-level factor Scope was codedusing Helmert Coding: The first contrast com-pared Super-scope vs. the two other scopes andthe second contrast compared clausal scope vs.

82

sub-clausal scope. Helmert Coding was the typeof coding best suited to our theoretical question:There was no true control condition with respectto Scope; the first comparison (Super vs. other)directly tested the Corrective/Speech Act Scopehypothesis while the second (Clausal versus Sub)tested the Propositional Scope hypothesis.

The results show a main effect of Language: Aprominence shift was generally more likely in En-glish than in Spanish. It also showed a main effectof Scope: Super-clausal scope (i.e., in our stim-uli, corrective focus) was more likely to cause aprominence shift than other types of scope. Cru-cially, there was also a significant interaction be-tween Language and Scope, showing that the dif-ference between super-clausal and other types ofscope observed in Spanish differed significantlyfrom that difference in English. To our knowledge,this is the first experimental demonstration that in-deed, the difference between corrective focus andother types of focus is important in determiningprominence shifts in Spanish, but not in English.

8.2 Cataphoric FocusWhen looking at prosodic focus marking in thefirst constituent, we see that the rate of prominenceshifts in NP1 is much lower compared to that inNP2. However, as seen in Figure 5, English nativespeakers do, to some degree, shift prominence tothe head noun in cataphoric focus contexts, whileSpanish native speakers almost never do.

English Spanish

0.12 0.16 0.07

0.19 0.27 0.12

0.08 0.18 0.06

0.01 0.00 0.00

0.01 0.01 0.00

0.01 0.02 0.00

0.000.250.500.751.00

0.000.250.500.751.00

0.000.250.500.751.00

Sub

Clause

Super

Both Head Noun Modifier Both Head Noun ModifierPro

min

ence

Shi

fts to

Hea

d N

oun

Figure 5: Prominence annotations for NP1 (Cat-aphoric focus)

The difference in the rate of cataphoric promi-nence shifts between the English and Spanish ex-periments is characterized by a significant main ef-fect of test language in the model shown in Table5. Scope was not a significant predictor.

9 Discussion and Conclusion

With respect to anaphoric focus, Spanish speakersshift prominence leftwards with greater frequency

Coeff (SE)(Intercept) −3.89 (0.31)∗∗∗

scope1 (Super vs. other) −0.19 (0.56)scope2 (Clause vs. Sub) −0.42 (0.67)language 3.40 (0.57)∗∗∗

scope1:language −1.07 (0.90)scope2:language −0.01 (1.29)∗∗∗p < 0.001, ∗∗p < 0.01, ∗p < 0.05

Table 5: Generalized linear mixed model- Cataphoric Focus. Formula: Annota-tion ∼ scope ∗ language + (1|participant) +(0+scope|participant) + (0+scope|item)

in the Super-clausal scope condition, where thefocus operator took wide scope over the speechact, than in the other two conditions with narrowerscope. This is compatible with the idea that inSpanish, only corrective focus is marked prosod-ically. It is also compatible with the idea thatin Spanish, ∼ necessarily takes scope over con-stituents that correspond to entire speech acts (the‘root’ level). This pattern of results cannot be ex-plained by the Propositional Scope hypothesis—if this was the correct explanation, then the casein which both operators attach to constituents de-noting propositions should allow for prominenceshifts in Spanish.

We found the rate of cataphoric focus markingto be fairly low in English, and essentially at floorin Spanish. A future study would need to findthe cause of the optionality in English. It couldbe that cataphoric focus marking requires greaterlook-ahead, although it would be difficult to seehow one could increase look-ahead in an experi-mental setting: Our participants already had plentyof time to plan their utterances. One idea could beto use written instructions instead of symbols, be-cause in such a case the majority of the sentence(besides the prosodic realization) would alreadybe planned out for the speaker. Another methodthat might encourage a higher degree of cataphoricfocus marking in an experimental setting wouldbe to create a situation in which the task is time-sensitive and the speaker is required to increasethe response time of the listener: Perhaps in sucha case, cataphoric focus would be employed morefrequently, in order to help the listener anticipatethe final game instruction and respond with greaterspeed.

An unexpected result is that the rate of promi-

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nence shift in Spanish for corrective focus wasonly 37% — fairly low in comparison to English.We have suggested that the source of the differ-ence between English and Spanish could be ex-plained by the scope of ∼. However, this couldfunction in two different ways: Either Spanish al-lows only very wide (root-level) scope for ∼, oronly wide-scope ∼ shows prosodic effects (see(Vander Klok et al., 2014) for a related proposalfor French).

Under the view that ∼ can only attach to root-level nodes, one possible way to explain the lowrate of Spanish prominence shifts is that our stim-uli were in fact ambiguous between two differentkinds of structures: The first structure involves asingle speech act with two sub-commands, whichwe separate here with a comma. In this case, theutterance includes what is sometimes called ‘con-trastive negation’ (McCawley, 1991) or ‘replacivenegation’ (Jacobs, 1991). The second possiblestructure involves two independent speech acts:

(11) a. Don’t click angel number two, clickdonkey number two.

b. Don’t click angel number two. Clickdonkey number two.

If Spanish speakers only shifted prominence inone of these two structures, it would shed furtherlight on the precise conditions governing prosodicfocus marking in Spanish. We have not yet tried totest whether there is any evidence in our data forsuch a distinction (for example, the two structuresmight differ with respect to the boundary tonesseparating the two commands).

Another possibility is that ∼ can attach at alllevels in Spanish, but only has prosodic effects at-tached at the root level. Our parallelism manipu-lation sets an upper bound for the scope of ∼ (itcannot attach to a node that includes both legs ofthe parallelism, since then there is no appropriateantecedent anymore). It also sets a lower bound (itcannot attach lower than the node that contains theF-marked constituent). But, as was pointed out tous by a reviewer, it is still compatible with severalattachment sites (provided that lower scope is pos-sible at all in Spanish). Our corrective condition iscompatible with adjoining the ∼ operators at theNP level, since their presupposition is fulfilled forthis contrast between smaller constituents as well:

(12) a. Narrow Scope: Don’t click

∼[angelF number two], click∼[donkeyF number two].

b. Wide Scope: Don’t ∼[click angelFnumber two], ∼[click donkeyFnumber two].

Note that in English, either wide or narrow attach-ment of ∼ would lead to a prominence shift, butbased on this hypothesis, only giving widest scopeto ∼ would lead to a prominence shift in the sec-ond leg of the parallelism in Spanish. Variation inthe scope of ∼ could therefore explain the loweraccentuation rate in Spanish compared to English.

Understanding the relatively low rate of correc-tive focus marking in Spanish might prove crucialin order to further differentiate the different in-terpretations of the observed patterns. What ourresults clearly show is that corrective focus is in-deed different from other types of focus in Spanishin terms of its prosodic realization. Furthermore,we maintain that corrective focus can be describedin syntactic terms: corrective focus involves root-level scope of ∼, as was argued in Vander Klok etal. (2014).

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the members of prosody.lab for helpwith the alignment and annotation of the data, aswell as Kalyna Franko and Kristina van Anne,who were involved in collecting data. Spanishintuitions were provided by Jose Aleman Banon,Iris Hauser, and Maite Martınez Garcıa. Thanksas well to Lydia White, for comments on earlierdrafts. This research was supported by fundingfrom a SSHRC Canada Research Chair, as well asa SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship, and SSHRC grant435-2014-1504.

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