Intonation of absolute interrogatives in the Southern Spanish in spontaneous speech

Abstract

The principal objective of this paper is to verify whether the four patterns described by Castilian Spanish interrogatives in perception tests can be found in the speech of native speakers from the South of Spain (Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia, Castile-La Mancha) and the Canary Islands. In addition, the study aims to discover whether there are specific melodic features in each area, and ultimately to identify the semantic-pragmatic meanings of each pattern. The research, based on 186 absolute questions issued in a context of spontaneous speech, has been carried out following the Melodic Analysis of Speech methodology. The results of the acoustic analysis allow us to a) demonstrate the existence of the four patterns in the five dialectal regions studied; b) determine that, from a linguistic intonation viewpoint, there appear to be no melodic features that distinguish each area, but a different pattern representation, and c) describe the social-pragmatic meanings proposed by Escandell (1998, 2002), allowing us to distinguish the pattern used in each context.