Prosody as a cue for syntactic dependency. Evidence from dependent and independent clauses with subordination marks in Spanish

•Elliptical clauses in Spanish show continuation rises as a mark of syntactic dependence.•Insubordinated clauses do not show prosodic continuation marks.•Intonation is the linguistic feature, which allows us to distinguish between insubordinated clauses and other semi-dependent clauses.

Insubordination studies often refer to some prosodic features of insubordinated constructions but, to date, no systematic research has been carried out on the effects of insubordination on prosody. This paper analyzes the prosody of both independent and semi-dependent clauses, with subordination marks, using a corpus of 1,230 utterances. The data show that while subordinate and elliptical clauses that can recover the elided clause show prosodic markings of continuation (rising boundary tones), insubordinated clauses do not. In a word, the level of dependence of a grammatical construction with subordination marks is reflected in its prosody.