Constraints on Intonational Prominence of Focalized Constituents

Across languages, in narrow contrastive focus constructions one or more cues (morphological, syntactic, intonational) are used by speakers in order to express the intended meaning correctly, singling out the focalized element or constituent from the rest of the elements in the sentence. However, in this article I will provide evidence that in the pitch-accent dialects of Basque classified as Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB, Hualde, Elordieta, Gaminde and Smiljanic 2002) narrow focus expressions may be left unexpressed through these cues. There are cases in which focalized words cannot be identified on the basis of syntax or intonation alone (morphology does not play a role as a focus cue in Basque). They may satisfy the necessary syntactic conditions, but they do not satisfy the necessary conditions imposed by the intonational grammar of these dialects. There is a constraint on intonational focalization limiting main intonational prominence to focalized words that bear a lexical or derived pitch accent, and more radically to words that constitute a separate intonational unit on their own, an Accentual Phrase (AP). A word forms an independent AP if it has a H*+L pitch accent and the word to its left ends an AP.