| Sumario: | This work investigates the use of accentuation to indicate broad and narrow focus in the Central dialect of Catalan. In response to a question such as “Who sang the song?” English speakers can say “JOE sang the song”, indicating the narrow focus of the answer by an accent on “Joe” and by the absence of accents on the following words. It has been claimed that in some Romance languages accent cannot be used to indicate focus in this way. Such languages choose instead to alter the grammatical structure of the response, for instance “The song, it was sung by Joe”. In this case, “Joe” is moved to an accentual prominent position. This work shows that in fact the “English-type” mechanism of achieving focus by re-structuring the prosody is fully available to a Central Catalan speaker and goes on to explore the details of its implementation, especially in contexts that express contrast. In doing this, she investigates quite a number of basic issues in the intonational analysis of Catalan within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. The results found in Catalan are later compared to Engish.
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