This thesis develops a model of Spanish intonation designed to account for all possible melodic contours of the language, from a phonetic and phonological point of view. The principles and methods used are mostly derived from the Pierrehumbert (1980) theory of English intonation. The empirical foundation for the model is based on the fundamental frequency contour, which is considered to be the phonetic representation of the underlying tonal structure. The underlying representation consists of sequences of only two tones, High and Low, which conform two tonal categories: pitch accents and boundary tones. These are considered to be on a separate autosegmental tier from the syllables and other suprasegmental elements. A set of rules associate the tones to the texts according to the stress patterns. By means of these elements and principles the phonological organization of some recurrent intonational patterns in Spanish is described, and a repertoire of pitch accents is proposed. The notation used is abstract, as only underlying units and their alignment to the text is represented. This analysis also accounts for the important intonational distinctions that occur between Spanish dialects. It is shown here that the most important differences can be described in terms of underlying tones. This suggests that these differences are not only phonetic but also phonological in nature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8147 |
| Date | 01 January 1991 |
| Creators | Sosa, Juan Manuel |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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