Focus Realization in Heritage Spanish
Ingo Feldhausen, María del Mar Vanrell · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024
We shed light on the question of how narrow information (F) and contrastive focus (CF) are intonationally and syntactically realized by heritage speakers (HSs) of Peninsular Spanish (PS) who have German as their second L1, and compare their data to those of monolingual speakers (MSs) of PS. Results from a production experiment show clear differences between the groups with respect to preferred syntactic strategies and, consequently, the intonational realization of focal pitch accents. The preferred strategy of HSs is stress shift, followed by p-movement and simple clefts, for both focus types. Conversely, MSs mostly use different strategies for each focus type; that is, pseudo-clefts and p-movement for F, and simple clefts and focus fronting for CF. Interestingly, stress shift is not a relevant option. The attested differences support the view that the interface between discourse on one hand, and syntax and phonology on the other, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Sorace, 2011).