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Due to their addressing nature, vocatives and imperatives have been said in multiple occasions to have the same function and similar phonological characteristics. The aim of this paper is to examine the intonational link between these two kinds of sentences in Peninsular Spanish considering sociopragmatic and situational factors like the level of formality and the degree of insistence. In order to do so, twenty-eight native speakers of Peninsular Spanish produced isolated names and verbs in formal and informal settings followed by insistent productions. The phonetic and phonological analyses of 1232 one-word productions indicate that both speech acts share multiple contours; namely L* H%, L + H* HL%, L + H* !H%, L + H* L%, L + H* H%, L + H* LH%. Nevertheless, L + H* L% was the most used contour for both speech acts regardless of the sociopragmatic and situational factors. Interestingly, speakers modified the phonetic properties of intensity and F0 depending on the situation since informal and insistent productions had a higher F0, wider pitch excursions and more intensity than their formal and non-insistent counterparts. As alternatives, L* L% contours were attested in formal imperatives while L + H* LH% and L + H* HL% were more common in informal ones. After L + H* L% contours, L + H* HL% and L* H% were the preferred options in formal vocatives but the latter was hardly attested in informal ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we offer a panoramic overview of the development of Andean Spanish and Andean Linguistics, from a theoretical point of view of language contact and universal grammar. We discuss how the notion of Andean Spanish came into existence, the issues under debate, and the consequences of different theoretical positions. We also introduce the contents of the papers included in this special issue, and highlight their key points, framing them in the context of the research on universal grammar. The following five areas are covered: (1) the convergence of Quechua and Aymara, (2) the impact of bilingualism on intonation, (3) the sharing of suffixes in contact situations, (4) the modification of the present perfect tense in Spanish in contact with Quechua, and (5) the properties of the Quechua case system from the point of view of contact varieties. Finally, we provide some remarks on bilingual education, and some suggestions for further directions for future research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract This paper introduces the melodic characterisation of spontaneous Spanish presented by speakers from two regions in the north of Spain: Asturias and Navarre, based on a conversational corpus composed of 100 utterances emitted by 62 participants. It focuses on the intonation of the dialects, an aspect which is poorly investigated but highly relevant for characterising and distinguishing one from the other. The study is based on the Melodic Analysis of Speech method, a meticulous acoustic analysis through which exact values are obtained from spontaneous speech, which can then be compared. In short, the most notable coincident and divergent melodic features between the two dialects are: (1) the tendency of the two to present a first peak, more frequently tonic in Asturian Spanish and atonic in Navarrese; (2) an almost flat or slightly falling body of the contour with abundant internal inflections, which are also distinguished by the syllable where the rise ends: tonic in Asturian Spanish, and tonic and atonic in the final position of the word in Navarrese; and (3) more pronounced final inflections, with five different endings, and tonal fields, in the region of Navarre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE AUTOSEGMENTAL-METRICAL APPROACH (Pierrehumbert 1980) paved the way for the investigation of intonation as a linguistic characteristic of non-tonal languages such as Spanish (e.g. Face 2002, Hualde 2003). However, most studies deal with native Spanish and have not yet extended the approach to nonnative Spanish, particularly in non-study abroad contexts. This paper uses the AM approach to analyze the phonetic characteristics of key intonational events in nonnative Spanish. The participants were five native English speakers involved in romantic relationships with native Spanish speakers. The results indicate that, to a certain degree, nonnative acquisition of Spanish intonation does occur. The speakers' successful acquisition can be attributed to their identification of their partners' dialect as the specific intonation target and their motivation to use Spanish as the primary language of communication in the relationship. The results lend support to the importance of apperceived input in the process of second language acquisition (Gass 1988). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the preliminary results of a study focused on the definition of an inventory, of tonal patterns in Spanish dialogue speech using the GLISSANDO corpus, a corpus aimed for prosodic studies composed by a wide sample of formal and informal dialogues recorded by several speakers. The patterns described have been obtained automatically by applying the F0 contours stylisation, annotation and modeling procedure described in Garrido (2010) to a small sample of the corpus, four interactions (three formal and one informal) between two professional radio speakers, male and female (22 minutes and 53 seconds total duration). Results suggest that tonal patterns used in Spanish dialogues are, in general, the same as the ones used in reading style, although their uses and functions are probably slightly different as it was pointed out in previous studies. In any case, an in-depth analysis of the material collected in GLISSANDO will provide more details to confirm these initial conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study makes a foray into the politeness strategies used by English learners of Spanish by comparing a corpus of invitations and requests recorded by 14 adult English learners of beginner-level Spanish as part of their course assignment to the data recorded by 12 native speakers. The native speakers' data was collected using discourse completion tests, which elicited offers and requests in scenarios controlled for social distance, power, and the cost of the request or offer. All the data was analysed pragmatically, by quantifying the occurrence of politeness strategies, and phonologically, by transcribing pitch accents and boundary tones in line with the guidelines of the Autosegmental Metrical framework. The results show that, depending on the situation, native speakers combine the use of different lexical and morpho-syntactic devices with the use of specific intonational patterns. Most learners at beginner level correctly use a limited range of morpho-syntactic politeness strategies appropriate to their level, and these are frequently reinforced with intonation. However, our data also show that beginner learners often transfer the intonational patterns of their first language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work on intonation, especially related to Spanish, has not focused extensively on second language acquisition in general. Within this context, little to no research has addressed how language instructors use rhythm and melody to facilitate the oral comprehension of language learners. This study begins to enter this space by analyzing recordings of Spanish language instructors reading passages directed at first year language students. The main results reveal that the these language instructors indeed employ intonational strategies such as pitch range expansion, early peak alignment, increased time and extent of pitch rises, less pitch reduction, and stress addition. All of these characteristics corroborate and expand upon previous literature on narrow focus and emphatic speech styles in Spanish. In this case, phonetic cues are produced to create special emphasis on words that are of particular interest to students when answering oral comprehension questions on a written exam. The concluding remarks hope to spark future perceptual studies that will help us gain a more complete picture of how didactic speech benefits learners with low levels of proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mapping of information structure onto morphology or intonation varies greatly crosslinguistically. Agglutinative languages, like Inuktitut or Quechua, have a rich morphological layer onto which discourse-level features are mapped but a limited use of intonation. Instead, English or Spanish lack grammaticalized morphemes that convey discourse-level information but use intonation to a relatively large extent. We propose that the difference found in these two pairs of languages follows from a division of labor across language modules, such that two extreme values of the continuum of possible interactions across modules are available as well as combinations of morphological and intonational markers. At one extreme, in languages such as Inuktitut and Quechua, a rich set of morphemes with scope over constituents convey sentence-level and discourse-level distinctions, making the alignment of intonational patterns and information structure apparently redundant. At the other extreme, as in English and to some extent Spanish, a series of consistent alignments of PF and syntactic structure are required to distinguish sentence types and to determine the information value of a constituent. This results in a complementary distribution of morphology and intonation in these languages. In contact situations, overlap between patterns of module interaction are attested. Evidence from Quechua–Spanish and Inuktitut–English bilinguals supports a bidirectionality of crosslinguistic influence; intonational patterns emerge in non-intonational languages to distinguish sentence types, whereas morphemes or discourse particles emerge in intonational languages to mark discourse-level features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]