Structura de informaţie la nivel cognitiv a rostirilor propoziţiilor negative în limba română
A Cognitive View on Information Structure in Romanian Utterances of Negative Statements

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims to describe the Information Structure (IS) of Romanian negative statements by using an F0 contour interpretation at the cognitive level. The IS analysis of contours is based on a cognitive (pre-linguistic) model. The descriptions of IS partitions deduced from F0 contours are then related to the semantic aspects of the negation phenomenon: the phrase accent and the focus position of the new information element within the rheme part of sentence. Important prosodic characteristics are added to those presented in Dascălu-Jinga 2001 şi Dascălu-Jinga 1998 related to Romanian intonational contours of negative sentence utterances.The new aspect introduced by the paper in the F0 contour analysis is the cognitive IS model which interprets melodic forms of prosodic words as functional element marks. In section 2 the IS model at the cognitive level is presented by defining information unit, the two structural levels and nuclear accent rules. The model can describe a cognitive reality of information packaging within utterances that is different from the syntactic and semantic organization of sentences. In section 3 are presented 5 utterances of negative sentences. After their F0 contours partitioning, IS model-based descriptions are applied to the resulted partitions and they can explain how is implemented at the pragmatic level the semantic focus function of the constituent which is responsible from the non-realization of the action within negative sentence. The examples of negative sentences include cases where the negation particle bears only acoustic prominence (constituent negation) and others, where it also bears functional prominence at the cognitive and semantic IS level. In the latter case, the particle nu negates the whole sentence and it has a positive acoustical prominence (melodic peak) and a functional prominence at the cognitive and semantic level. The F0 contour analysis leads to the conclusion that focus event usually shares the same position with the nuclear element within one partition but there are cases when they have different positions. This is an argument to treat them as different structural aspects of utterances at the semantic level and at the information packaging level, respectively. We conclude that the paper is useful for students and linguist researchers who are interested to deepen the comprehension of the pragmatic realization of the negation phenomenon within Romanian utterances by identifying the IS partition hierarchy of utterances at the cognitive level, including local and global nuclear elements.

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