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Share Paper 1722

The Prosody of Simple Sentences in the Spanish of Barcelona, a Spanish-Catalan Bilingual Context
Lourdes Romera, Valeria Salcioli, Ana M. Fernández-Planas, Josefina Carrera, and Domingo Román
167-181 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

The AMPER Project seeks to collect and describe different prosodic samples of Romance languages for a large-scale multimedia atlas. Within this framework, the present paper examines several simple sentences produced by a 35-year-old female, whose first language Spanish shows a noticeable Catalan influence. The analyses performed on the corpus of 81 sentences focused on F0, duration, and intensity. As for F0 a similar intonation contour to that of the Catalan of Barcelona was observed for declaratives and interrogatives with and without the unstressed conjunction que in sentence-initial position. Examination of the phonetic results reveals a fall in the intonation curve at the end of declaratives (L% or L*L% according to the type of final pitch accent in the sentence), a prominent peak at the beginning of the predicate of interrogatives without que (L*+H; H+L* or L+H*+L according to the type of pitch accent) and L*+HH% in sentences ending in paroxytone or proparoxytone words, or H*H% in sentences ending in oxytone words. Interrogatives with que display the pattern L* at the end of the predicate. The general conclusion is that the passive knowledge of the prosody of a non-native contact language, in this case Catalan, appears to play a major role in modifying or determining the prosody of the speaker's mother tongue, here Spanish.

Published in

Selected Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology
edited by Laura Colantoni and Jeffrey Steele
Table of contents
Printed edition: $210.00