Broad focus declaratives in Veneto-Spanish bilinguals: Peak alignment and language contact

Abstract

This paper examines peak alignment in Veneto-Spanish bilinguals in the small community of Chipilo, Mexico. We have two goals: First, to provide a description of the peak alignment patterns present in bilingual Chipilo Spanish. As Chipilo Spanish is in contact with a northern Italian variety (Veneto), we hypothesize that changes in peak alignment from monolingual norms, specifically regarding early peak alignment, may be due to transfer from Veneto. Second, we seek to compare the present data, based on controlled speech, to the results of a previous study on semi-spontaneous speech in Chipilo Spanish, contributing to the literature that compares methodologies in intonation research (see Face 2003). Our results show that bilinguals demonstrate early peaks in controlled speech, although to a lesser extent than in semi-spontaneous speech. We attribute this to contact with Veneto and a strong sense of ethnolinguistic identity that leads speakers to maintain features of a Chipileño variety of Spanish.

Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals

“…Bilinguals have been reported to perform differently across tasks, particularly when tasks are not culturally appropriate in one of the languages (e.g., Sánchez 2008;Kiser 2014) or demand the use of skills that bilinguals may not have in one language (e.g., reading in the language in which they have not been educated; Tsimpli 2014). These task effects have also been observed in intonation studies (Barnes and Michnowicz 2015;Colantoni et al 2016). These studies, however, did not explore whether access to contextual information was responsible for the differences observed.…”

“…Production studies are not only more abundant, but they have also investigated a wider range of language pairings, including many typologically different languages. Once again, the evidence supports CLI, but different outcomes have been reported, such as convergence (Colantoni and Gurlekian 2004;Barnes and Michnowicz 2015), hybrid (Lai 2018) or mixed patterns (Queen 2001(Queen , 2012, overgeneralizations and hypercorrections (Santiago and Delais-Roussarie 2012). Moreover, changes due to CLI have been documented for different parts of the utterance.…”

“…Moreover, changes due to CLI have been documented for different parts of the utterance. For example, changes in the alignment of high tones in prenuclear accents have been reported for Spanish declaratives in contact with Italian (Colantoni and Gurlekian 2004;Barnes and Michnowicz 2015) and for Spanish and English declaratives in English-Spanish bilinguals (Zárate-Sández 2015). Nuclear contours have been reported to display patterns of convergence in declaratives in Spanish in contact with Italian (Colantoni and Gurlekian 2004), Spanish in contact with Catalan (Simonet 2011) and Yami in contact with Mandarin (Lai 2018).…”

Intonation of Greek in contact with Turkish: a diachronic study

“…Colantoni and Gurlekian (2004) argue that the alignment patterns still found in Buenos Aires Spanish declaratives almost sixty years after the end of the immigration wave of Italians are due to the covert prestige of Italian. Barnes and Michnowicz (2015) report that the contact between Veneto Italian and Mexican Spanish in Chipilo, Mexico resulted in Italian-like patterns of prenuclear peak alignment in broad focus declaratives. They maintain that the influence of Veneto Italian has persisted because speakers identify with Veneto and are proud of their language and heritage.…”

“…Second, we investigate data from four generations, whereas most of the papers cited above use data from just one or two. Third, whereas most studies use small corpora of speech elicited in a laboratory setting, we employ a large corpus of mostly spontaneous and semispontaneous speech because of the stronger influence of the source language on a contact variety in natural than in controlled laboratory speech (Barnes & Michnowicz, 2015).…”