AND MARIA DEL MAR VANRELL 2.1 Introduction 2.1.1 Geographical distribution of the Catalan language Catalan is a Romance language that is spoken by about 10 million people in a region that lies within four adjacent European states, Andorra, Italy, France, and Spain. 1 Fig. 2.1 shows a map of the geographical areas where Catalan is spoken, subdivided into its major and traditionally accepted dialects (Veny 1982): Central Catalan and Northwestern Catalan (spoken in Catalonia, Aragon, and Andorra), Valencian Catalan (Valencian region), Balearic Catalan (Balearic Islands), Northern Catalan (in the Roussillon region of southern France, roughly equivalent to the current département of Pyrénées-Orientales), and Algherese Catalan (in the city of l'Alguer, Sardinia). Breaking down the total number of roughly 10 million Catalan speakers by geographic area, Catalonia and the Valencian region provide the great majority, with 5,703,000 and 2,952,000 respectively, followed by the Balearic community with 735,000 speakers. The remaining territories provide much smaller figures, with 61,000 speakers in Andorra, 142,000 speakers in southern France, and 24,000 in the city of l'Alguer (Sardinia, Italy) (data from Pons and Sorolla 2009). With respect to its legal status, Catalan is the official language in Andorra; within Spain it is co-official 1 The data comes from the Enquesta dels usos lingüístics a Catalunya 2003, coordinated by J. Torres and updated by Pons and Sorolla (2009) and Querol (2010).
In Portuguese, different strategies for dealing with tune-text accommodation have been reported. However, no systematic research has been conducted exploring crucial cases of complex nuclear melodies realized in nuclear words with final stress, as in yes-no questions. Based on reading and semispontaneous data from ten regions in Brazil and eleven regions in Portugal, this study reveals that Brazilian and European Portuguese globally differ with respect to the strategies implemented: in Brazilian Portuguese, the text is preserved and the melody is changed (mostly by means of tonal truncation); in European Portuguese, the melody is preserved and the text is changed through various strategies, including schwa epenthesis. Faithfulness to the text or to the tune is thus a relevant dimension of variation both across and within languages, and text changes (through vowel lengthening, vowel split, vowel epenthesis, or blocking of vowel deletion) are crucial means to support tune realization that have recently been found in unrelated languages.
This study investigates the link between interrogative intonation and meaning in child-directed speech (henceforth CDS) and how this is reflected in the early development of yes-no-interrogatives of Catalan-and Spanish-speaking children. Previous research found that children before the two-word period produce several types of interrogatives and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory pattern (Lleó & Rakow 2011;Prieto et al. 2012). Yet prior studies have not included an analysis of the pragmatic meanings that are encoded intonationally. This investigation takes an integrated approach to the study of intonational development within the domain of yes-no questions, exploring further the correspondence between intonational form and meaning in early interrogative production and relating it to the pragmatics of interrogative intonation in child-directed speech. A set of 723 interrogative utterances produced by 3 Catalan-and 2 Spanish-acquiring children between the onset of interrogative production and 2;4 were pragmatically and then prosodically analyzed, as well as a set of 867 utterances from Catalan and Spanish CDS. The data were extracted from the Serra-Solé Catalan Corpus and the Ojea and López-Ornat Spanish Corpora in CHILDES. Production results show that all children perform some instance of questioning before the two-word period and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory patterns. Moreover, the results show a preference relationship between the different types of nuclear pitch configurations and the pragmatic meanings that underlie the yes-no-interrogative forms. Finally, these results highlight the importance of the assessment of form-meaning relationships for the understanding of intonational development.
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