Seqüències no desaccentuables en català: prosòdia aliena en el català de TV3

Abstract

Non-deaccentable sequences in Catalan: alien prosody in the Catalan of TV3 In Catalan the division of theme and rheme is achieved through syntax (Vallduví 1992, 2008). The item that receives the sentence stress delimits the utterance, so that any material after it will be marked as thematic by being forced into position of dislocation. For this reason, Catalan prosody does not allow deaccentuation within the phrase (except in the case of certain postmodifiers), the deaccented material being in the dislocated thematic position. This prosodic-syntactic isomorphy in Catalan requires translators and language consultants to be aware that the position of the sentence stress is directly related to syntactic structure, to avoid calquing strategies typical of other languages (such as accent-shift in situ), and to use correct equivalents (such as dislocation). This article describes the linguistic contexts that may give rise to a type of prosody alien to Catalan, while suggesting the corresponding alternatives. The data is taken from a corpus of TV3 transmissions.