This paper describes some of the more salient intonational phenomena of Spanish, and reviews several of the most pressing questions that remain to be addressed before a deÞnitive model of the system can be incorporated into a consensus transcription system for the language. The phenomena reviewed include the metrical underpinnings of the tune, and some of the local tone shapes that are anchored at stressed syllables or at phrase edges in several common intonation contours. The description of known facts is couched in the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology, as is the review of outstanding questions. The description is used to motivate the preliminary transcription conventions proposed by the Spanish ToBI development group.

In studies of T/V address systems, research typically ignores plural forms in favor of their singular counterparts. We show that there is widespread asymmetry between singular and plural T/V forms in Castilian Spanish, and that the historically T plural vosotros often serves as the plural of both tú (T) and usted (V). Our data consist of naturally-occurring examples, interviews with a dozen Spaniards across three generations, and the results of an online survey that polled speakers about their pronominal choices when offered three scenarios involving multiple interlocutors, some addressed as tú and others as usted in the singular. In each scenario, respondent use of vosotros in the plural was significantly higher than their corresponding use of tú in the singular.

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This paper provides a phonetic analysis of intervocalic /r/ in lower-class Highland Bolivian Spanish. Results show that in this dialect rhotic assibilation has progressed beyond the fricative [ř] already reported by several scholars (cf. Navarro Tomás 1980; Canfield 1981; Lipski 1994; Sessarego 2011), to a voiced apical sibilant [z̺]. This article, in fact, offers the first spectrographic analysis of this segment. Findings are analyzed in light of a number of studies dealing with rhotic variability in Spanish. In particular, results are compared with those by Sessarego (2011), who provided an acoustic analysis of /r/ realizations for upper-middle-class Highland Bolivian Spanish speakers, without finding any instance of [z̺].

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