New prosodic patterns in Catalan: Information status and (de)accentability

Catalan presents isomorphism between surface structure and prosodic pattern in the mapping of the theme-rheme partition (information status). However, Catalan is experiencing an increase in prosodic patterns in which accent placement is not always associated with a discursive function. These patterns, new to the Catalan standard inventory, are observed in a corpus of fictional production. Apart from the prosodic strategy of accent-shift in situ (available in English, and Spanish to a certain extent), which substitutes for its syntactic standard Catalan counterpart (right-dislocation, with primary accent on the rightmost item of the rheme, marking sentence boundary), two other previously unattested prosodic patterns are also observed in the corpus: the ANT pattern (with accent on an item which is not rheme-final), and the DEL pattern (with accent on a thematic item; i.e., beyond the rheme). The frequency of use of these novel strategies increases over time, as hypothesised. This might be in detriment of Catalan syntax, since accent position in Catalan sentences might be evolving towards its dissociation from syntactic patterning. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.