The Prosody of the Prenuclear Part in European and Latin-American Dialects of Spanish

Abstract

In the present work we focus on the prosodic features of the prenuclear section in three dialects of Spanish: Northern Castilian, Southern Castilian and Porteño. We specifically analyze the position and prosodic prominence of the first peak of 100 spontaneous declarative utterances of each variety, to check (1) whether the 'suspension bridge' structure described for the declarative melody is characteristic in each of the dialects (Bolinger, 1961), with rising melody from the utterance-initial syllable to the first peak, and (2) to see if the first melodic peaks are accompanied by another salient prosodic feature(s). For such research we use the triphasic analysis protocol of Cantero (2019), in which the values ​​of tone, intensity and duration are standardized to get rid of the inter-individual characteristics of the informants. According to the results, in spontaneous speech the structure of the 'suspension bridge' is less typical, and the first peak rarely coincides with the first stressed syllable of the utterance. The porteño is the variety characterized by the greatest melodic movements towards the first peak, while the longest duration is associated with it in the southern dialect of European Spanish.