Prosody in Spanish-Portuguese Contact

Abstract

The contact varieties Olivenza Portuguese and Olivenza Spanish, spoken in the border area between Extremadura (Spain) and Alto Alentejo (Portugal), have long been disregarded in research on both intonation and speech rhythm. The present work aims to fill this gap by investigating the intonation and the speech rhythm of Olivenza Portuguese spoken by bilingual speakers and of Olivenza Spanish spoken by monolingual speakers and by offering a detailed description of the intonational and rhythmic patterns of these two contact varieties. Such a description contributes, first, to a better knowledge of the varieties spoken in the Romance space, second, to a documentation of a dying variety, namely Olivenza Portuguese, and third, to a better understanding of how prosodic systems in language contact situations change.

To achieve the goals presented above, semi-spontaneous speech recorded from ten bilingual speakers of Olivenza Portuguese and ten monolingual speakers of Olivenza Spanish was examined. The material analyzed with respect to both intonation and speech rhythm includes neutral and biased declaratives, neutral and biased yes-no questions, neutral and biased wh-questions, echo questions, and imperatives. The intonational analysis, carried out within the Autosegmental-Metrical model and the ToBI framework (cf. Pierrehumbert 1980; Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986; Silverman et al. 1992; Ladd 1996, 2008; Beckman et al. 2005, among many others), provides a description of the phonetic realization and the phonological representation of pitch accents and boundary tones. The rhythmic analysis is based on the calculation of the following rhythm metrics: %V, VarcoV, VarcoC, VnPVI, CrPVI, and CnPVI (cf. Ramus et al. 1999; Grabe & Low 2002; Dellwo & Wagner 2003; Ferragne & Pellegrino 2004; Dellwo 2006; White & Mattys 2007a; Kinoshita & Sheppard 2011, among others).

According to the findings of this study, Olivenza Portuguese and Olivenza Spanish show similarities concerning, first, the prosodic phrasing and the durational properties of neutral SVO declarative sentences, second, the tonal realization of numerous sentence types (e.g., neutral SVO declarative sentences, contrastive focus statements, exclamative statements, information-seeking yes-no questions, exclamative yes-no questions with counterexpectational meaning, confirmation-seeking yes-no questions, information-seeking wh-questions, exclamative wh-questions, imperative wh-questions, echo yes-no questions, echo wh-questions, and commands), and third, the rhythmic properties of declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives.

The discussion of the results of the present work in the light of language contact allowed the assumptions that, first, the prosody of the current variety of Olivenza Portuguese can be interpreted as the outcome of wholesale convergence between the (Olivenza) Portuguese and the Spanish prosodic systems, and second, the prosody of the current variety of Olivenza Spanish can be interpreted as the outcome of both substratum transfer and convergence processes. Furthermore, it can be suggested that all kinds of prosodic features can result from transfer and/or convergence. Finally, on the basis of the assumptions made concerning the change of the intonational system of Olivenza Portuguese, the following hierarchy was proposed (the symbol ‘>’ means ‘more sensitive to change than’): Prenuclear accents > Focus markers > Nuclear configurations > Prosodic phrasing > IP-final lengthening used to convey sentence modality contrasts.