Chapter published in:
Aspects of Latin American Spanish Dialectology: In honor of Terrell A. Morgan
Edited by Manuel Díaz-Campos and Sandro Sessarego
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 32] 2021
► pp. 155–179

Declarative intonation in four Afro-Hispanic varieties

Phonological analysis and implications

| University of Virginia
| University of Wisconsin-Madison
| The University of Texas at Austin
This chapter studies declarative intonation using the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology in four Afro-Hispanic varieties: Chinchano, Chocó, Chota Valley, and Yungueño. We analyze the inventory of pitch accents, intermediate phrase boundary tones and intonational phrase boundary tones in declarative utterances extracted from spontaneous-speech corpora. The intonational inventories of these Afro-Hispanic varieties are significantly reduced in comparison with what has been observed in the declaratives of other native varieties of Spanish. Our data imply that speakers’ patterns are the result of a cross-generational transmission of simplified intonational features, stemming from second-language acquisition strategies rather than substrate influences.
Keywords: Chinchano Spanish, Chocó Spanish, Chota Valley Spanish, Yungueño Spanish, intonation, pitch accent, phrase boundary, discourse-phonology interface
Published online: 12 January 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.32.07kor
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