Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Argentina leolabas@hotmail.com, aledabro@gmail.com
Like other Romance languages, Spanish has traditionally been considered to resort mainly to variations in constituent order (Ladd, 1996) to express focal structure. Thus, it may be classified among the ‘non-plastic’ languages (Vallduví and Engdahl, 1996). While some scholars do not think it is possible to shift the position of the nuclear pitch accent to reflect focus (Sosa, 1991), others maintain that such a change is possible only in cases of contrast or emphasis (Zubizarreta, 1998). Among intonation specialists who have worked on the variation in the position of the nuclear accent to reflect focus, Toledo (1989) and Face (2000, 2001, 2002) have explored different phonetic and phonological aspects of focus marking in Buenos Aires and Castilian Spanish respectively, both with a contrastive and a non-contrastive meaning.
This paper explores the prosodic expression of information structure through deaccenting in the Buenos Aires dialect as a phenomenon at the interface between phonology and pragmatics. The corpus consists of spontaneous speech in TV and radio interviews. Spontaneous speech differs from lab speech in several important respects (Face, 2003). Deaccenting is found more frequently in impromptu speech than in lab speech. Despite disfluencies, hesitations, voice overlap, etc, spontaneous speech constitutes a faithful source of what speakers do when they communicate with each other.
The phonological analysis follows the guidelines of the autosegmental- metrical approach to intonation (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Ladd, 1996) applied to Spanish (Sosa and Hualde in Prieto, 2003). It pays particular attention to the significance of the last pitch accent in the intonational unit (Ladd: 204, 1996).
The pragmatic analysis is carried out within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, 2004). Relevance is a property of cognitive and linguistic inputs. In communicating, speakers balance considerations of effect and effort: the more cognitive effects an utterance achieves, the more relevant it is;
the more processing effort it demands, the less relevant it will seem. Like all other linguistic inputs, prosody contributes to the relevance of utterances by guiding the hearer towards the desired cognitive effects. Any increase in processing effort to achieve those effects is justified only if it results in a global increase of the relevance of the utterance. (Wilson and Wharton, 2006).
As Spanish favours rearrangement in constituent order to express focus by placing focal constituents at the end of the sentence, the nuclear accent usually occurs at the end of the intonational unit. This is the least demanding position from the point of view of processing effort. When the final focal accent is shifted to earlier positions and the final constituent(s) is/are deaccented, the resulting extra processing effort is justified because it achieves cognitive effects which increase the global relevance of the utterance by avoiding a more costly linguistic formulation of the same idea, for example by syntactic rearrangement.
The corpus collected shows that Buenos Aires Spanish allows deaccenting for pragmatic purposes. In fact, it seems to follow two strategies: the post-focal
stretch may be completely deaccented (figure 1 below), or post-focal accents may be retained (figure 2 below). A similar observation has been made by Ortiz Lira (1995, 2000) for the Santiago variety of Chilean Spanish. Following Garcia- Lecumberri (1995), these two can be considered to be manifestations of one and the same phonological choice: deaccenting given information in post-nuclear material. Post-focal accents may result from rhythmical considerations, as Spanish seems to prefer to retain word stress in connected speech.
Figures
References
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Figure 1: an example of post-nuclear deaccenting
Figure 2: an example of a post-nuclear pitch accent (marked with an arrow)
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Relating prosody to pronominal reference: information structure