Entonación y ambigüedad. Determinante vs. intensificador adverbial
Fecha
1996Resumen
In this article we deal with the intonational exponence of a closed
grammatical system of English. The two terms of the system contain
identical lexical strings whose syntactic description is assigned solely
by the intonational subsystem known as tonicity. The alternative placement
of the intonational nucleus on one word or another of the string
causes the nucleus-bearing word to be categorised as either a quantifier
or an adverbial intensifier. Mapping the two English sentences onto the
Spanish and Catalan equivalents, we find that intonation has no longer
a role, and the contrasting structural descriptions of the sentences obtained
is determined by the different word order of the strings. We finish
with a note on the pedagogical implications stemming fron our analysis
as regards the teaching of English intonation to both Spanish and
Catalan students.