Intonation and convergence in Galicia: Comparing bilingual Galician and Galician Spanish
Timothy Gupton, University of Georgia
For Castro (2003: 43), “nothing is more noticeable than the special intonation” of Spanish in Galicia, and for Ramallo (2007: 25), “pitch accent…sets a Spanish speaker in Galicia apart”. In this presentation, I report on collaborative research conducted with María Morado-Vázquez (Ohio State University), in which we examine this characteristic intonation in greater detail among Spanish-Galician bilinguals with varying linguistic dominance. We seek to improve on previous work on Galician and GS (e.g. Fernández Rei 2019, Pérez Castillejo & de la Fuente Iglesias 2024) that has not properly controlled for information structure by using a controlled experimental methodology with contextualized prompts to construct a variety of information focus and contrastive focus utterances. In this presentation, I discuss descriptive and inferential analyses of data gathered in Northern Galicia that seek to determine: 1) what the intonation contours are for Galician and Galician Spanish, and 2) whether Spanish-dominant Galicians exhibit convergence via similar intonation contours to Galician-dominant Galicians in Gupton (2021). We adopt the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) protocol (Cantero, 2002; Cantero & Font-Rotchés, 2009) to facilitate comparisons between mixed groups of males and females and to motivate Autosegmental (AS) classifications of nuclear pitch accents (e.g. Pierrehumbert, 1980).
Sponsored by Language Sciences and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese
