The intonation of lengthenings in northern and southern dialects of Spanish

Absztrakt

This research focuses on the prosodic patterns of lengthenings attested in northern and southern dialects of European Spanish, more precisely, on their intonation. A corpus of 200 spontaneous utterances has been elaborated (including 100 utterances from the northern dialects and 100 utterances from the southern ones, produced by 16 male and 16 female informants, respectively). The analysis has been carried out following the standardization protocol offered by Cantero Serena & Font-Rotchés (2009), Cantero Serena (2019) and Cantero & Font-Rotchés (2020), in which the representative values of intonation (in Hz) are taken for each syllable, and then these values undergo a process of standardization, in order to be comparable objectively and speaker-independently. It is expected that lengthenings show no remarkable inter-dialectal melodic differences. Also, it is predicted that lengthenings do not present prominent prosodic features as compared to their context, because they may serve as a tool for the speaker to maintain the conversational turn, without interrupting the tonal movement of the utterance.