La entonación del español de Galicia desde una perspectiva sociofonética

Abstract

Intonation in Spanish communicates linguistic meaning, such as the contrast between declarative and interrogative utterances, as well as extralinguistic information, such as the speaker's regional origin. One variety of Spanish in which intonation serves as a dialectal marker is the one spoken in Galicia (Northwestern Spain). This dissertation describes how Galician Spanish (GS) intonation differs from standard Castilian Spanish intonation and investigates how the differences are related to the historical contact with Galician. Participants (N = 74) were recruited from different areas across Galicia and asked to perform a contextualized sentence reading task, an unscripted question-statement game and a written sociolinguistic questionnaire. The reading task elicited structurally identical declaratives and interrogatives, with the declaratives presented in broad focus contexts and the interrogatives framed as unmarked information-seeking questions and marked confirmatory questions. Tokens (N = 6,382) were subject to acoustic analysis and several measures of pitch scaling and tonal alignment were taken. The data were also coded for contour type, pragmatic context, task formality and sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age, rural vs. urban origin, or the exposure to and use of Galician. Nine distinct patterns (four declarative and five interrogative) were discovered and their frequency of use varied across tasks, which indicates that the declarative-interrogative intonational contrast in Spanish is subject to dialectal and stylistic variation. With respect to the difference between information-seeking and confirmatory questions, it was only produced via intonation by two speakers, which suggests that this contrastive use of intonation is also subject to dialectal variation. In the sociolinguistic analysis, four aspects of Galician Spanish intonation were found to bear a relationship to the speakers' domain of exposure to Galician (intermediate peak height, prenuclear falling accents in declaratives and interrogatives, nuclear falling accents in declaratives, and unmarked falling tonemes in absolute interrogatives). The status of these as contact-induced features or as changes brought about by language-internal causes is discussed, as well as other findings that contribute to our understanding of how language contact may affect intonation, such as the relaxation of markedness restrictions or the fossilization of certain aspects of the language-shifting generation's interlanguage.