The intonation of Italian verbless exclamatives
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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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2003 ◽
Vol 26
(1)
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pp. 81-109
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2015 ◽
Vol 51
(3)
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2016 ◽
Vol 61
(2)
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pp. 119-155
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