Abstract This paper presents an empirical study on the prosody of clitic left-dislocations (CLLDs) in Spanish and offers new perspectives on how the phenomenon of inter-speaker variation in linguistic data can be integrated into formal grammatical theory. Results from a production experiment based on scripted speech show that CLLDs have an obligatory left and right boundary (typically a high edge tone at the intermediate phrase level), while other sentence-internal boundaries are subject to inter-speaker variation. The hypothesis presented here suggests that prosodic boundaries which mark information structural (IS) categories are more necessary than boundaries which satisfy alignment constraints; only the latter can show inter-speaker variation (IS-over-Alignment Hypothesis). A modified version of the Stochastic Optimality Theory (SOT) is proposed to account for the attested inter-speaker variation. By assuming that the degree of constraint overlap can vary between individual speakers while the underlying hierarchy remains invariant, the modified version of SOT is applicable beyond variation in the output structure of a whole population.

中文翻译：

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讲者间的差异，最优性理论和西班牙左倾位错的韵律

摘要本文对西班牙语中的气候左位错（CLLD）的韵律进行了实证研究，并就如何将语言数据中的说话人间变异现象整合到形式语法理论中提供了新的见解。基于脚本化语音的生产实验的结果表明，CLLD具有强制性的左右边界（通常在中间短语级别上具有较高的边缘音调），而其他句子内部边界则可能会发生说话者之间的差异。这里提出的假设表明，标记信息结构（IS）类别的韵律边界比满足对齐约束的边界更为必要。只有后者可以显示发言人之间的差异（IS-over-Alignment假设）。提出了随机最优性理论（SOT）的改进版本，以说明已证明的扬声器间差异。通过假定约束重叠的程度可以在各个说话者之间变化而基础层次保持不变，则SOT的修改版本适用于整个人口输出结构的变化。