It has often been claimed that Spanish tends to keep the nucleus at the end of the intonation phrase and resorts mainly to word order variation for marking focus. This paper aims to explore cases of early nucleus placement in Argentinian Spanish, which reveal that defocalisation is possible with or without a contrastive interpretation. These cases…

AbstractThis chapter aims to explore an aspect of the interface between prosody and pragmatics by examining the contribution of intonation to the process of utterance interpretation in spontaneous speech. Buenos Aires Spanish has three nuclear pitch accent + boundary tone configurations associated with declarative utterances: (a) high-falling (H+L*…