Afro-Peruvian Spanish declarative intonation

Abstract

This study offers an analysis of Afro-Peruvian Spanish (APS) declarative intonation. Our findings indicate that this dialect presents intonational features that diverge from other varieties of Spanish. It shows minimal downstepping across utterances and a predominant use of the L+H* pitch accent, even in prenuclear position, where L+>H* is more commonly cited in neutral contexts. At intermediate phrase edges, the most common APS boundary tone is L- rather than H-, which is usually employed in other varieties to indicate the continuation of a thought. Our results evidence a simplified set of phonological targets, which are analyzed as the byproduct of SLA processes that were subsequently conventionalized and nativized at the community level by later generations of APS speakers.

The Intonation of Peruvian Amazonian Spanish Declaratives: An Exploration of Spontaneous Speech

“…This finding suggests that in PAS as spoken in Pucallpa, speakers consistently produce pitch accents across the whole utterance. This supports previous findings for PAS that found minimal deaccenting across declarative types (García 2023; this lack of deaccenting has also been reported in Afro-Hispanic varieties by Rao 2016 andButera et al 2020). Similarly, I found instances in which there was a F0 falling contour during the stressed syllable (H+L*), particularly in one-syllable words.…”

“…When it comes to the larger body of literature on contact languages, this study reinforces some of the patterns found across contact situations in the Spanish-speaking world, specifically when it comes to tonal alignment in broad focus declaratives. The present findings raise important questions regarding whether these alignment patterns are the result of simply being contact varieties, a byproduct of universal processes of L2 acquisition (as claimed by Sessarego and Rao 2016;Butera et al 2020), or if/how specific languages in contact impact the intonational patterns of PAS. One possible venue for future research would be to examine the speech patterns of bilinguals of Spanish and Shipibo-Konibo, and to see how those compare to the speech patterns of monolingual Spanish speakers in the area.…”

“…To what extent is this higher rate due to the specific Amazonian language (Shipibo-Konibo) being in contact with Spanish, or simply being an instance of language contact more broadly? Since I do not have enough evidence from Shipibo-Konibo to tease apart the effect one language has over the other, and given that an early peak alignment is the preferred intonational pattern of broad focus declaratives, not only in the Spanish spoken in Pucallpa (in both spontaneous and read speech), but also in several Spanish contact varieties, I can only hypothesize that overall, an early peak alignment may be the one pattern Spanish speakers of language contact varieties resort to in neutral contexts (for a discussion of simplified intonational features in second language acquisition, see Sessarego and Rao 2016;Butera et al 2020). Future research could shed light on the effects that specific languages may have (or may have had) on the F0 peak alignment in the Spanish spoken in the Amazonian region of Peru.…”

A Preliminary Exploration of Declarative Intonation in the Chilean Diaspora of Sweden

“…We acknowledge the challenges of this approach-a tradeoff of working with spontaneous speech and a lack of control over what is being elicited-due to potential subjectivity and pragmatic nuances that could be at play, but trained researchers in this area have used similar approaches successfully, leading us to follow suit (see Butera et al 2020 We are grateful to Tomas Riad for his correspondence regarding such complexities.…”