Structural change in Catalan discourse

What is it about?

For the function of theme-rheme mapping onto sentence structure, Catalan right-dislocation, a syntactically-based operation, is being substituted by in situ accent-shift, a prosodic strategy. This structural innovation found in the data analysed is probably triggered by a calque from English and Spanish, which do have the prosodic variant. The occurrences found in the corpus (oral television production from non-spontaneous, supervised genres) indicate that the phenomenon is going on unnoticed by language advisors. By showing that a non-standard prosodic strategy alien to the Catalan inventory has increased over the two periods studied, I prove that the (structural) calque is making progress. The frequency of occurrence of this calque may pave the way for its acceptance as a valid Catalan resource among Catalan speakers since the intimate link between prosody and syntax in Catalan gets blurred

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