Miami Cuban Spanish Declarative Intonation

Abstract

The current study is a phonetic description and phonological analysis, using the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) theory of intonational phonology, of broad focus (neutral) declarative utterances in the Spanish of three generations of Miami Cubans. No differences were found across these three generations indicating the maintenance of a robust intonational pattern for declarative utterances. The prenuclear (non-final) pitch accent is analyzed to be L*+H and the nuclear pitch accent is L+H*. This phonological analysis is similar to what has been found for many other varieties of Spanish. A high rate of deaccenting, however, was observed in conjunction with the final lexically stressed syllable. The prevalence of deaccented final stressed syllables is unique to what has been found for other Spanish varieties.

Multilingual Miami: Current Trends in Sociolinguistic Research

“…Lynch's (, ) findings regarding divisions within the Cuban community in Miami, as well as Alvord's () findings on differential intonation patterns of Cuban Americans vis‐à‐vis first‐generation Cuban immigrants, pose interesting questions regarding Cuban dialect change, Spanish dialect contact, and the phonological evolution of Spanish in a language contact situation. Similarly, research on processes of liquid variation within the context of Miami would likely yield interesting findings on both synchronic and diachronic grounds.…”

Research on Heritage Spanish Phonetics and Phonology: Pedagogical and Curricular Implications

“…Within the small body of work that has been carried out, intonation has been examined the most, while rhythm and stress have only begun to receive attention very recently. v Alvord's (2010aAlvord's ( , 2010b work on Cuban Spanish statementand-question intonation incorporates one generation (i.e., third generation) of HL users. His key findings are that -particularly in the case of question intonation -social networks, ties to a Cuban identity, and possibly English intonation all seem to play a role in third generation patterns, which diverge more from those of the second generation than from those of the first generation.…”

Style, prosodic variation, and the social meaning of intonation

“…Within the Hispanic tradition, research in intonation has traditionally relied on the analysis of multiple repetitions of prepared sentences under some variation of a reading task (see e.g. Prieto, van Santen & Hirschberg 1995;Face 2002Face , 2007O'Rourke 2005;Willis 2006/7;Alvord 2010;Simonet 2010). One exception is Prieto & Roseano (2010b), based on Prieto (2001), who present speech data from ten dialects of Spanish in which informants responded to a guided discourse completion questionnaire.…”

“…Experimental and descriptive research in the AM framework documents a rich intonational system not only in terms of the tonal targets that are available (see e.g. Quilis 1993;Sosa 1999Sosa , 2003Willis 2003;Face & Prieto 2006/7;Face 2007), but also in terms of the dialectal variation that is present (Zamora & Guitart 1982;P ⁄ aez Urdaneta 1989;Lipski 1994;Beckman et al 2002;Face 2002Face , 2004Face , 2007Face , 2008Willis 2003Willis , 2005Willis , 2006Butragueño 2004;Colantoni & Gurlekian 2004;O'Rourke 2005;Alvord 2006Alvord , 2010Simonet 2008;Henriksen 2009;Prieto & Roseano 2010b). Much of this variation has been localized at the utterance-final or tonemic level of intonational analysis, in line with Navarro Tom ⁄ as' original proposals.…”