Peak alignment of pre-nuclear and nuclear accents in Argentine Spanish

1. Peak alignment of pre-nuclear and nuclear accents in Argentine Spanish Laura Colantoni University of Toronto

2. Outline • Argentine Spanish intonation • Controlled speech • Buenos Aires Spanish: database for speech synthesis • Catamarca, Mendoza, Misiones, Salta and Tucuman Spanish: database for speech recognition • Semi-spontaneous speech • Corrientes and San Juan Spanish: Linguistic atlas of Argentina

3. Buenos Aires Spanish • Broad focus declaratives (Colantoni & Grulekian 2004; cf. also Sosa 1999, Toledo 2000) • Pre-nuclear accents • Peak aligned within the stressed syllable • Valley aligned within the post-tonic syllable • Nuclear accents • L* (?); valley aligned within the stressed syllable

4. Pre-nuclear accents Table 1: Alignment patterns for pre-nuclear accents according to their relative position in the utterance

5. Pre-nuclear accents Figure 1: Early peak alignment in aplaZO ‘she/he postponed’, extracted from the sentence La justicia aplazó el referendum en el ayuntamiento ‘The court postponed the referendum in the city hall’

6. Nuclear accents Table 2: Alignment patterns in nuclear accents in utterance final intonational contours

7. Nuclear accents Figure 2: Final intonation contour extracted from the sentence Cuando sopla viento norte, cambian su comportamiento “When there is a northern wind, (people) change their behavior”

8. Problems • Pre-nuclear accents • Early peak alignment: Not frequent but found in other varieties (e.g. Peruvian Spanish; cf. O’Rourke 2004) • H* vs. L+H* • Nuclear accents • L* described for other varieties • Probable difference in the magnitude of downstep • Phonetic or phonological difference? • NB: only BA Spanish; reading style

9. Other Argentine Spanish varieties • On-going project (Colantoni, Enbe, and Pérez Ibáñez) • Data source • Database for recognition • 1000 speakers • Task: sentence-reading • Varieties selected • Catamarca • Mendoza • Misiones • Salta • Tucuman

10. Pre-nuclear accents Figure 3: Pre-nuclear accents (alignment patterns) in the five varieties under study

11. Pre-nuclear accents • General tendency: • Peak aligned within stressed syllable • Higher degree of variation (when compared to BA Spanish) in varieties under study • Cross-dialectal variation: • Increasing frequency of low tones aligned within the stressed syllable, especially in Catamarca, Mendoza and Tucuman

12. Nuclear accents Figure 4: Nuclear accents (alignment patterns) in the five varieties under study

13. Nuclear accents • Mendoza, Misiones, (Tucuman) • Tendency: peak aligned within the stressed syllable • Salta and Catamarca • Tendency: low tone aligned within the stressed syllable

14. Problems • Differences in the alignment of pre-nuclear accents • Differences in the alignment of nuclear accents • Cross-dialectal variation • Phonetic vs. phonological differences • NB: • Reading task • Instructions (?)

15. Semi-spontaneous speech • Data: • Linguistic atlas of Argentina • Female speakers: • Corrientes (4) • San Juan (2) • Narratives (only statements were analyzed)

16. Theoretical questions • Differences between formal and spontaneous speech • Cross-dialectal differences and the AM model • Status of the differences observed (i.e. phonological vs. phonetic) • Alignment and phonological categories

17. Pre-nuclear accents

18. Corrientes • Late peak alignment • Consistent with previous descriptions of other Spanish varieties • Similarities with Misiones Spanish (Colantoni et al.) • Late peak alignment: second most frequent pattern • Early peak alignment • Emphasis and/or contrastive focus

19. Pre-nuclear accents: late peak alignment Figure 5: Late peak alignment in miRANdo, ‘looking’, Beron de Astrada (Corrientes)

20. Pre-nuclear accents: early peak alignment Figure 6: Early peak alignment in reIa, ‘to laugh (3ps), San Cosme (Corrientes)

21. San Juan • Late peak alignment • Again, pattern observed in other Spanish varieties • Similarities with Mendoza Spanish (Colantoni et al.) • Late peak alignment: most frequent pattern for one of the speakers in the study

22. Pre-nuclear accents: late peak alignment Figure 7: Late peak alignment in roBAba, ‘to steal’ (3ps, IMP), Villa Krause (San Juan)

23. Nuclear accents

24. Corrientes and San Juan Spanish • Corrientes, San Juan vs. Buenos Aires Spanish • Higher frequency of peaks aligned within the stressed syllable • San Juan vs. Corrientes • Peaks aligned within the stressed syllable more frequently in San Juan than in Corrientes; • Consistent with our previous analysis of Mendoza and Misiones Spanish

25. Nuclear accents in San Juan Spanish Figure 8: Early peak alignment in pioLIN, ‘thread’, Valle Fertil (San Juan)

26. Nuclear accents in Corrientes Spanish Figure 9: Early peak alignment in BAIlan, ‘to dance’ (3pp, present), B. de Astrada (Corrientes)

27. Concluding remarks • Controlled vs. spontaneous speech • Preliminary data seem to indicate that tendencies observed in controlled speech are also valid for semi-spontaneous speech • Problems in the analysis of spontaneous speech • Sample size • Control of contextual factors • Transcription

28. Concluding remarks • Cross-dialectal studies of intonation • Capturing the differences with the AM model • General tendencies • Is it enough? • Refining the labeling method • Adding duration and intensity analyses

29. References • Colantoni, Laura & Gurlekian, Jorge. 2004. Convergence and intonation: historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish. Bilingualism: language and cognition, 7, 107-119. • O'Rourke, Erin. 2004. Peak alignment in Peru: Spanish in contact with Quechua. In: Contemporary approaches to Romance lingusitics. Ed. by J. Auger, J. Clancy Clements and B. Vance, Bloomington, Indiana. • Sosa, Juan Manuel. 1999. La entonación del español: su estructura fónica, variabilidad y dialectología. Madrid: Cátedra. • Toledo, Guillermo. 2000. H en el español de Buenos Aires. Langues et Linguistique, 26, 107-27.