La marcación prosódica del foco informativo en huave de San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca, México

This paper investigates the different prosodic strategies used for the marking of information focus in Huave language spoken in San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca, Mexico. For this purpose, a study was carried out in which prosodic properties of answers to a pronominal question with respect to visual stimuli were analyzed. Results show that the word bearing the nuclear accent is the last phonological word in a sentence and that the most frequent accent for signaling information focus are pitch accents (!)H* or L+H*. This allows us to postulate that Huave is a to-the-right nuclear accent language. With respect to phonological phrase, results differentiates from the findings in the analysis in Pike & Warkentin (1961), Noyer (1991) and Pak (2007) in the sense that it is not only the domain of H tone spreading to the right, but it was found that it is also possible to notice a wider pitch range (L+H*) in the position of object of a sentence, this is local prosodic resource to preserve the infraction to the restriction of phonological downstep (Gussenhoven 2004).