Structural change in Catalan discourse

Abstract

For the function of theme-rheme mapping onto sentence structure, Catalan right-dislocation, a syntactically-based operation, is being replaced 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 uses a prosodic variant. The occurrences found in the corpus (oral television production from non-spontaneous, supervised genres) indicate that the phenomenon is occurring unnoticed by language advisors. By showing that a non-standard prosodic strategy alien to the Catalan inventory has increased over the two periods studied, it is proved that the (structural) calque is making progress. The frequency of the occurrence of this calque may pave the way for its acceptance as a valid Catalan resource among Catalan speakers, as the intimate link between prosody and syntax in Catalan is blurred.