Information packaging, language contact and linguistic changeestructural calque in catalan

Laburpena

Title: Information packaging, language contact and linguistic change: structural calque in catalán RESUMEN: ABSTRACT This dissertation studies a structural innovation of a prosodic kind attested in current oral catalán. This work draws on two main theoretical frameworks: infbrmation packaging and linguistic variation. The structure analysed is (a) "Hauríem de passar d'aixó , vs. (b) "N'hauríem de passar, d'aixó". while (b) presents the syntactic standard variant (dislocation), (a) presents the prosodic non-standard variant (accent-shift in si tu) for the same function: the mapping of the theme-rheme partition onto sentence structure. it is proved that the pnenomenon (a structural calque, according to the proposal also put forward in the dissertation) is progressing since the occurrence of (a) has increased over the two periods studied. The Corpus, oral televisión production from non-spontaneous genres, shows that the phenomenon is going on unnoticed by "linguistic advisors. It is argued that the existence of variation may lead to linguistic change. Contact with English and Spanish, which do have variant (a) as a standard strategy, and the occurrence of other non-standard prosodic phenomena also attested in the data may favour it.