Journal of Portuguese Linguistics
Volume 8, No. 1, 2009
Abstracts
Spoken in northern Uruguay along the border with Brazil are intertwined Spanish-Portuguese dialects known to linguists as Fronterizo `border’ dialects, and to the speakers themselves as portuñol. Since until the second half of the 19th century northern Uruguay was populated principally by monolingual Portuguese speakers, it is usually assumed that Fronterizo arose when Spanish-speaking settlers arrived in large numbers. Left unexplained, however, is the genesis of morphosyntactically intertwined language, rather than, e.g. Spanish with many Portuguese borrowings or vice versa. The present study analyzes data from several communities along the Brazilian border (in Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay), where Portuguese is spoken frequently but dysfluently (with much involuntary mixing of Spanish) by Spanish speakers in their dealings with Brazilians. A componential analysis of mixed language from these communities is compared with Uruguayan Fronterizo data, and a high degree of quantitative structural similarity is demonstrated. The inclusion of sociohistorical data from late 19th century northern Uruguay complements the contemporary Spanish-Portuguese mixing examples, in support of the claim that Uruguayan Fronterizo was formed not in a situation of balanced bilingualism but rather as the result of the sort of fluid but dysfluent approximations to a second language found in contemporary border communities.
This paper reports on an experimental investigation of wh-question intonation in Peninsular Spanish. Speech data were collected from six León, Spain Peninsular Spanish speakers, and oral production data were elicited under two conditions: a computerized sentence reading task and an information gap task-oriented dialogue. The latter task was an adaptation of the HCRC Map Task method (cf. Anderson et al., 1991) and was designed to elicit multiple wh-question productions in an unscripted and more spontaneous speech style than the standard sentence reading task. Results indicate that four contours exist in the tonal inventory of the six speakers. The two most frequent contours were a final rise contour and a nuclear circumflex contour. Systematic task-based differences were found for four of the six speakers, indicating that sentence reading task data alone may not accurately reflect spontaneous speech tonal patterns (cf. Cruttenden, 2007; but see also Lickley, Schepman, & Ladd, 2005). The experimental findings serve to clarify a number of assumptions about the syntax-prosody interface underlying wh-question utterance signaling; they also have implications for research methods in intonation and task-based variation in laboratory phonology.
HUBERT
TRUCKENBRODT, FILOMENA SÂNDALO &
MARIA BERNADETE ABAURRE
Experimental results on Brazilian Portuguese (BP) intonation are reported, concentrating on speakers from the Campinas area. A combined production and perception study shows that four nuclear contours are produced and distinguished: statements (H+L* L%), emphatic statements (same, with higher F0), yes/no-questions (L+H* L%), and surprise questions (L*+H L%). A first semi-compositional analysis of the contours is offered, in which the declarative/interrogative distinction (not marked morphosyntactically on BP yes/no-questions) is encoded by the choice of L* vs. H* pitch accent. A distinction corresponding to English committing vs. non-committing intonation is marked in addition by the choice of bitonal H+L vs. L+H pitch accent. Further, it is shown that focus is marked by four out of our six speakers by the absence of a pitch accent following an early narrow focus, as well as by increased relative length of the focused constituent.
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