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The current study analyses the intonation of three types of utterances (broad focus statements, information-seeking yes-no questions and information-seeking wh-questions) in Galician and Spanish, in order to research the effects on the intonation of the prolonged contact between these two languages in Galicia. The main aims are to detect possible hybridisation processes in the intonation of these varieties and determine whether the intonation behaviour is different depending on the language used or on the language profile of the speakers. To that end, this study presents an empirical study which analyses these three types of utterances in Spanish and Galician, produced by 22 informants with different linguistic profiles. The results indicate little variability in the intonation based on the initial and habitual languages of the speakers or the language in which they produce the corpus. However, the existence of some hybrid patterns in wh-questions has been detected. The theoretical implications of these results will be discussed within the framework of hybridisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Galician and Portuguese have a common origin. This genetic affiliation is not accompanied by any historical continuity (Monteagudo 2012: 38), as these language varieties were separated in a distant past, mainly through the establishment of a political and administrative boundary between their territories. This lack of contact is interesting when studying common and divergent linguistic phenomena, in particular in the field of prosody and intonation, as it presupposes a challenge to historical study, given that we only recently have sound recordings of speech. Our proposal is therefore to contribute towards a diachronic study of the intonation of absolute interrogatives in Galician and Portuguese by using synchronic data collected over the past decade. We aim to show the usefulness of the quantitative method of measuring prosodic distances, because it enables us to determine geographic areas using common standards and shows the degree of separation between the intonations of the two varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]