The interplay of information structure, semantics, prosody, and word ordering in Spanish intransitives

Abstract

A production experiment was run to examine how information structure and verbal semantics affect word ordering and nuclear stress placement in intransitive sentences in Venezuelan Spanish. Unaccusative verbs in Spanish are said to be more likely to be subject final (VS order) than unergative verbs, while in languages like English, this is marked with stress shift (i.e., Sv, caps show the nuclear stress). It has long been contended, however, that the semantic factors underlying split intransitivity actually affect information structure, rather than syntax directly. If so, then the effect of verbal semantics on word ordering/nuclear stress placement should be able to be overridden by information structure. Venezuelan Spanish speakers described pictures using a printed unaccusative or unergative verb in response to a question manipulating the information structure type of the subject, i.e., broad focus, theme, QUD-focus, or contrastive focus. Results showed that QUD- and contrastively focused subjects were more likely to carry nuclear stress. Subject stress was also more likely for unaccusatives, but this effect was weaker. Overall stress shift was much more frequent than subject final placement, with neither information structure type nor verb type affecting the likelihood of either response type. These results raise challenges for standard assumptions about the relationship between information structure and unaccusativity, and between final subject placement and stress shift.