Adverbial modifiers of time in English and Spanish utterances: position and phonetic prominence

The article deals with the problem of syntactic and intonation characteristics of adverbial modifiers of time in English and Spanish. Different types of word order in these two languages account for peculiar features of their position and phonetic prominence. Ways of adverbial modifiers’ marking on the basis of their communicative significance in English and Spanish are described. Production and perception experimental methods involving native English and Spanish speakers are proposed. The methods include analyzing both native English speech and English speech of Spanish speakers. Results of comparative research of the English examples and their Spanish translations in different contexts are presented; analyses of incorrect variants revealed on the basis of the perception experiment in the reading of Spanish speakers is given. Dependence of adverbial modifiers’ position in Spanish sentences on their informative significance is demonstrated. The results prove that Spanish speakers’ difficulties with intoning English sentences are caused by the interfering influence of their native language. The importance of the study results for improving English and Spanish teaching methodology, as well as their applicability in courses on comparative and contrastive linguistics are set out.