skip to content

A05 - Prominence marking and language contact in Spanish

The basic goal of the project is to determine the most important prominence marking strategies in Yucatecan Spanish against the background of the variety's longstanding and ongoing contact with Yucatec Maya. The project addresses "structural prominence marking", i.e. structural constraints on phrasing and accentuation, as well as "pragmatic prominence marking" destined to highlight particular constituents for pragmatic reasons. The central aim of the current project phase is to compare the structural and pragmatic prominence marking properties of YS, YM, and standard Mexican Spanish by means of cross-linguistic comparison of production data and acceptability judgments. In later stages, we will also deal with loan word prosody and perception data, and we aim at elaborating a contact model which is appropriate to account for the exaptation and/or grammaticalization of prosodic features.

See list of publications

Team

PD Dr. Melanie Uth

PD Dr. Melanie Uth

Project Leader A05

Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 3.09
E-Mail: melanie.uth(at)uni-koeln.de
Phone: (+49) 221 470-89915
Nuria Martínez García

Nuria Martínez García

Doctoral student A05

Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 3.09
E-Mail: n.martinezgarcia(at)uni-koeln.de
Phone: (+49) 221 470-89915
Patrick Auhagen

Patrick Auhagen

Student assistant A05

Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 3.12
E-Mail: cauhagen(at)smail.uni-koeln.de
Phone: (+49) 221 470-89915
Verena Schlemmer

Verena Schlemmer

Student assistant A05

Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 3.12
E-Mail: vschlem1(at)uni-koeln.de
Phone: (+49) 221 470-89915

Publications

2021

  • Uth, Melanie. 2021. Same or different? Prosodic prominence and information structure in Yucatecan Spanish in picture-based elicitation compared to natural speech. In Alexander Teixeira Kalkhoff, Maria Selig & Christine Mooshammer (eds.), Prosody and conceptional variation, 75–91. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

2020

2019

2018

  • García García, Marco & Melanie Uth. 2018. Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond (Studies in Language Companion Series). (Eds.) Marco García García & Melanie Uth. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Uth, Melanie. 2018. Focus realization at the syntax-prosody interface: Yucatecan Spanish opposed to standard Mexican Spanish. In Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds.), Focus realization in Romance and Beyond, 71-98. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 
  • Uth, Melanie. 2018. Language contact as a developmental co-determinant between systems and exemplars. Spanish and Yucatec Maya in Quintana Roo. Cologne: University of Cologne. Habilitation.
  • Uth, Melanie & Marco García García. 2018. Introduction: Core issues of focus realization in Romance. In Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds.), Focus realization in Romance and Beyond, 1-30. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

2017

To top of page