This paper provides a comparative analysis of word-final nasals in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya based on speech data from Quintana Roo (Mexico). In Yucatecan Spanish, a nasal is often pronounced as [m] if placed at the end of a word (e.g., Yucatá[m] instead of Yucatá[n]). Since this phenomenon is widespread on the Yucatán Peninsula, but largely unknown in other Spanish-speaking regions, it is often linked to the influence of the indigenous language Yucatec Maya. Our Spanish dataset differs from our Yucatec Mayan one in that the labialization rate significantly increases with the length of the subsequent pause in the former, but not in the latter. Thus, even if the feature was originally transferred from Yucatec Maya to Spanish, it seems that it has taken on a life of its own in Yucatecan Spanish, determined by its function as a marker of prosodic prominence.

This article deals with the intonational realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation studies with a total of ten bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and Yucatec Maya (YM) and five monolingual speakers of YS suggest that contrastive focus in the Yucatecan Spanish variant spoken by the Spanish-dominant and monolingual speakers is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the intonation phrase (IP) followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety crucially differs from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive constituent is generally associated with an L+H* pitch accent (cf. de-la-Mota, Martín Butragueño & Prieto. 2010). However, the systematicity described above only shows up in the data produced by the Spanish-dominant and monolingual YS speakers, whereas the balanced bilingual data is characterized by much higher idiosyncratic variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems is also a matter of consolidation or strengthening of features.

This article deals with the prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation experiments with a total of 5 balanced bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and Yucatec Maya (YM), 5 Spanish dominant bilingual speakers of YS and YM, and 5monolingual speakers of YS suggest that in YS contrastive focus is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the Intonation Phrase, followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety importantly differs from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive constituent is generally associated with an L+H* pitch accent (cf. De la Mota 2010). However, the systematic behavior described above only shows up in the data produced by the Spanish dominant and monolingual speakers, whereas the data produced by the balanced bilingual speakers is characterized by a much higher amount of idiosyncratic variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems in language contact settings is, among other things, a matter of gradual consolidation or strengthening of features.

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Despite numerous theoretical approaches and empirical analyses, it is not entirely clear how different focus types and constructions are realized and interpreted in individual Romance languages. Due to the complexity of this linguistic area, an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic approach seems most appropriate for exploring the topic further. This introductory article gives an overview of the core problems related to focus realization in Romance, such as methodological incongruences, differences regarding the conceptualization of focus categories, and nonobservance of diatopic variation. Moreover, it gives an outline of the present volume and situates the contributions with respect to the aforementioned issues.