Changing the focus

This article examines the perception and production of the Focalizing Ser (FS) structure by Dominican speakers living in three urban communities: Santiago de los Caballeros, Sosúa, and Santo Domingo de Guzmán. FS has received increasing attention over the past years and several studies have investig...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Méndez Vallejo, Dunia Catalina
Tipo de documento: artigo
Data de publicação:2015
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositório:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglês
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:131562
Acesso em linha:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/131562
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.2
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Information structure, syntactic variation, focalizing ser, dominican spanish
Descrição
Resumo:This article examines the perception and production of the Focalizing Ser (FS) structure by Dominican speakers living in three urban communities: Santiago de los Caballeros, Sosúa, and Santo Domingo de Guzmán. FS has received increasing attention over the past years and several studies have investigated it from various linguistic perspectives in Spanish varieties where it is typically found (e.g. Venezuelan Spanish and Colombian Spanish). Although previously reported in Dominican Spanish (Toribio 2002, Alba 2004), FS has still not been extensively analyzed in this variety. The results of three different tests (two acceptability judgment tests and one semi-production test) indicate that FS is certainly entrenched in Dominican speakers' linguistic inventory and that certain focus types (e.g. FS-focused subject and object DPs, FS-focused CPs and IPs, FS- focused complex VPs, and FS-focused prepositional phrases) are more favorably perceived and more frequently produced across all FS dialects.