The purpose shapes the vocative: Prosodic realisation of Colombian Spanish vocatives

Abstract

The question of whether intonation contours directly signal meaning is an old one. We revisit this question using vocatives in Colombian Spanish (Bogotá). We recorded speakers' productions in three pragmatic conditions -greeting, confirmation-seeking, and reprimand -and compared proper names (vocatives) to situation-specific one-word utterances, such as ¡Hola! 'Hello' (non-vocatives). Intonational analyses showed no direct one-to-one correspondence between the pragmatic conditions and intonation contours: (a) for vocatives, e.g. a rising-falling contour occurred in both greetings and reprimands; and (b) for nonvocatives, e.g. a step-down contour (a.k.a. calling contour) occurred in both greeting and confirmation-seeking conditions. Looking beyond intonation to consider other phonetic variables -spectral tilt, duration, alignment of tonal targets, f0-range, f0-slope -the results showed that the intonation contours that occurred in more than one pragmatic condition differed in phonetic realisation, e.g. rising-falling vocatives showed differences in f0-range of the rise and spectral tilt. However, the corresponding non-vocatives did not show the same differences. Furthermore, vocatives in greeting contexts were realised differently from non-vocatives in greeting contexts. In sum, the pragmatic condition affects the prosodic realisation of (non-)vocatives, but the relationship is complex. The results are discussed in the light of prosodic constructions, leading to the conclusion that the prosodic realisation of vocatives and non-vocatives in Bogotá Colombian Spanish cannot be easily modelled by prosodic constructions.Intonation can convey linguistic information (e.g. syntactic constituency, reference resolution, illocution type), paralinguistic meaning (e.g. speakers' attitudes towards the propositions or

Vocative Intonation in Language Contact: The Case of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish

“…However, calling contours other than the vocative chant need not necessarily be pragmatically biased since some languages use them preferentially in neutral routine calls (e.g., L+H* HL% in Catalan or H* L% in Occitan, see Frota and Prieto 2015). Also, some studies, such as Huttenlauch et al (2018) for Columbian Spanish, showed that there is no direct one-to-one correspondence between intonational contours and pragmatic conditions in vocatives, even though the pragmatic conditions affect the realization of vocatives in a more complex relationship.…”

The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese

“…Recently, so-called 'prosodic constructions' have been suggested in the literature (Ward, 2019;Ward & Gallardo, 2017) in order to explain how prosodic cues combine to form meaningful configurations or constructions. Prosodic constructions are defined as "recurring temporal patterns of prosodic activity that express specific meanings and functions and which typically involve not only pitch contours but also energy, rate, timing and articulation properties" (Ward & Gallardo, 2017, 3f., but see Burdin, 2020;Huttenlauch, Feldhausen, & Braun, 2018, for arguments against prosodic constructions). The finding of joint modification of f0, duration, and voice quality is compatible with a prosodic construction approach.…”

Some considerations about intonation patterns of vocatives in Romanian language

“…The vocative is a complex semantic (lexical), grammatical and prosodic category, located in the area of interference of the systematic aspects of the language with the pragmatic ones. By marking the interpersonal relations between the speaker and the interlocutor, the vocative represents one of the most appropriate linguistic means for establishing correlations with the speakers' psycho-sociological variables (Borràs-Comes et al, 2015;Arvaniti et al, 2017;Huttenlauch et al, 2018).…”