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Lourdes Romera, Valeria Salcioli, Ana M. Fernández-Planas, Josefina Carrera, and Domingo Román
167-181 (complete pdf)
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
ISBN 978-1-57473-424-9 library binding
v+181 pages
publication date: 2008
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA