Comparative study (Spanish-French) of the correlation between the syntactic-semantic structures and intonation curves

• Published in: Revista internacional de lingüística iberoamericana : RILI 2011-01, Vol.9 (1), p.169-186
• Main Authors: Pamies, Antonio, Martin, Philippe, Pazos, Jose Manuel
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• ISSN: 1579-9425

Spanish intonation (AMPER 2005-2009) seems to play a demarcative role, since there is a correlation between tonal peaks and intonational group endings (in non-emphatic utterances). French intonation (Martin 1997-2009) opposes to each other the tonal contours of stressed vowels, and this contrast would also correspond to a demarcative function. However, the diversity of methods and theoretical frameworks used to obtain these data do not allow a reliable comparative hypothesis; it is therefore necessary to perform a specific experiment with the same methods and a corpus as similar as possible for both languages. This work confirms the initial hypothesis, and, besides, concludes that, although Spanish does not have such a contrast between stressed vowels tonal contours, this factor is also relevant because of its contrast with that of neighbouring unstressed vowels. Even if their tonal level is not exceeded, the highest internal movement of tone occurs "within" the stressed syllable. Adapted from the source document