Reconsidering a Focal Typology: Evidence from Spanish and Italian

Much work has been done on focus (and the related concepts of topic, comment, theme and rheme) in Spanish and Italian, with the majority concentrating on the ways in which word order is used to convey the interpretation of a grammatical element as the focus of the sentence (e.g. Bolinger 1954, 1954-1955; Contreras 1978, 1980 for Spanish and Antinucci and Cinque 1977; Beninca, Salvi and Frison 1988 for Italian). However, in traditional accounts of focus in these two languages, intonation has received very little consideration. A typical treatment is that of Bolinger (1954-1955) who, in a footnote in his article "Meaningful word order in Spanish" says that he has left intonation out of his account "in order not to complicate matters" (56). Despite the recognition by Bolinger and some other scholars that intonation is likely to be involved in conveying narrow focus, there remains a widely accepted division between languages that mark narrow focus through word order (without necessarily changing intonation pattern) and those that mark it through intonation alone (i.e. without a focal word order per se). Even in a book dedicated to intonation, this belief is evident: Ladd (1996:191) claims that in word order languages sentences like The COFFEE machine broke generally invert the subject and verb, resulting in, for example, S'e rotta la CAFFETTIERA in Italian, with the focal word occurring at the end of the utterance. Ladd goes on to say that "Word order modifications in languages like Spanish and Italian may indirectly achieve the accentual effects that English accomplishes directly by manipulating the location of the nuclear accent" (191). This type of statement not only maintains the traditional division between word order languages and intonation languages in the marking of narrow focus, but it also makes one wonder at how one way of marking narrow focus is more "direct" than the other. What is more, a number of Romance languages appear to use special tunes to express narrow as opposed to broad focus (e.g. Grice, 1995 for Palermo Italian; D'Imperio 2000, 2002 for Neapolitan Italian; Sosa 1999 for American Spanish; Frota 1995 for European Portuguese). There are two types of evidence that lead us to reconsider the traditional division between languages that mark narrow focus with word order and those that mark it with intonation. The first is that native speakers of Spanish and Italian have the intuition that they can emphasize a particular word of an utterance without manipulating word order. The second type of evidence comes from our recent experimental studies (e.g. Face 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2003 for Castilian Spanish and D'Imperio 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 for Neapolitan Italian; see Section 2.2) that have begun to look at the ways in which intonation is used as a marker of narrow focus in these two languages. Of particular interest to the issue of a typology based on word order and intonational marking of focus is that the intonational markers of narrow focus found in these studies do not simply accompany changes in word order. Rather they are used independently of word order to mark narrow focus in cases where the canonical broad focus SVO word order is employed. While intonation is used in Spanish and Italian to mark narrow focus, it is also important to point out that the traditional view is not without foundation. Both Spanish and Italian also use changes in word order to mark narrow focus, but the interaction of word order and intonation is different in the two languages. Therefore we propose a revision of the word order vs. intonation focal typology that is less rigid and that more adequately accounts for the differences between Spanish and Italian on the one hand and English on the other, and that also deals with the differences between Spanish and Italian. The varieties of the two Romance languages we will focus on are respectively the Castilian variety for Spanish and the Neapolitan variety for Italian since both have been extensively covered by recent experimental literature.