This paper provides a comparative analysis of word-final nasals in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya based on speech data from Quintana Roo (Mexico). In Yucatecan Spanish, a nasal is often pronounced as [m] if placed at the end of a word (e.g., Yucatá[m] instead of Yucatá[n]). Since this phenomenon is widespread on the Yucatán Peninsula, but largely unknown in other Spanish-speaking regions, it is often linked to the influence of the indigenous language Yucatec Maya. Our Spanish dataset differs from our Yucatec Mayan one in that the labialization rate significantly increases with the length of the subsequent pause in the former, but not in the latter. Thus, even if the feature was originally transferred from Yucatec Maya to Spanish, it seems that it has taken on a life of its own in Yucatecan Spanish, determined by its function as a marker of prosodic prominence.
This article deals with the intonational realization of
contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation
studies with a total of ten bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and
Yucatec Maya (YM) and five monolingual speakers of YS suggest that contrastive
focus in the Yucatecan Spanish variant spoken by the Spanish-dominant and
monolingual speakers is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the
intonation phrase (IP) followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a
contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety crucially differs
from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive
constituent is generally associated with an L+H* pitch accent (cf. de-la-Mota, Martín Butragueño & Prieto.
2010). However, the systematicity described above only shows up in
the data produced by the Spanish-dominant and monolingual YS speakers, whereas
the balanced bilingual data is characterized by much higher idiosyncratic
variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems is
also a matter of consolidation or strengthening of features.
This article deals with the prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation experiments with a total of 5 balanced bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and Yucatec Maya (YM), 5 Spanish dominant bilingual speakers of YS and YM, and 5monolingual speakers of YS suggest that in YS contrastive focus is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the Intonation Phrase, followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety importantly differs from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive constituent is generally associated with an L+H* pitch accent (cf. De la Mota 2010). However, the systematic behavior described above only shows up in the data produced by the Spanish dominant and monolingual speakers, whereas the data produced by the balanced bilingual speakers is characterized by a much higher amount of idiosyncratic variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems in language contact settings is, among other things, a matter of gradual consolidation or strengthening of features.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.