Information structure and acoustic physiognomy in equational copulative sentences

Abstract

This article presents the results of an acoustic and grammatical study of 21 equational or emphatic copulative sentences through melodic analysis (Cantero, 2002; Cantero & Font, 2009). This study was then followed by a pragmatic interpretation of the main findings in relation to their functionality as phonic correlates of the informative structure that individualizes the equational sentences as focus constructions (Gutiérrez, 1997; Cid & Maluenda, 2005; NGLE, 2009). The research was conducted under the general principles of functionalism (Silva-Corvalán, 2001; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Halliday, 2005), whereby the prosodic, syntactic and pragmatic features relieved in the analysis are considered relevant in the expression of the focuser role of the emphatic copulative sentences. The results showed a strong trend in the performance of emphatic accent in the utterance’s initial position, regardless of the focal type (contrastive or neutral) and equational type (cleft, pseudocleft and pseudocleft reverse)