Absolute interrogatives with branching, the marked case

Abstract

A partial corpus of absolute interrogative sentences within the AMPER Project (Multimedia Atlas of Prosody in the Romanesque Space, in the dialect of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is analyzed. Corpora are emitted by two female informants who opt for marked interrogative emissions: La guitarra/ romana (,) ¿se toca con paciencia/discreta? ‘The guitar / Roman guitar (,) played with patience / discrete patience?’ with Noun Phrase and Prepositional Phrase branchings. The chosen phrasing is composed of two restructuring phrases: (1) the declarative segment (ip = 􀁇 SN L-), (2) the initial questioning (􀁇 = SV %H), and the focal segment, the toneme (􀁇 = SPrep). The results indicate that most are marked emissions, and tonemes are circumflex in paroxytones and proparoxytones and rising in oxytones. They are compared with corpora without branching on earlier work produced by different informants.