Basic melodic contours in Majorcan Catalan: Shape and alignments of pitch movements in declaratives

Abstract

Research on Catalan intonation has almost always been focused on Central Catalan, spoken in Barcelona and Central Catalonia (Prieto, 2002; Estebas 2003, among many others). This variety, as it occurs with many metropolitan varieties, is the result of leveling processes motivated by intensive dialect contact in the city, due to growth and migration from different dialectal areas. If our long-term goal were to be able to reconstruct previous stages of Catalan (and Romance) intonation, it is clear that we would need data from other dialects as well. This is not unique to research on Catalan, as intonational studies on many Romance languages have been focused on the prestige dialects of these languages. The present paper is a contribution to this task: We take a rather descriptive approach and analyze in detail the shape of melodic contours in declaratives (in read speech) in Majorcan Catalan. Alignment patterns are also analyzed in detail, with respect to two time references. Majorcan Catalan (MC) is a dialect of Catalan spoken by about 500,000 speakers in the Western Mediterranean island of Majorca. Recasens (1998) points out that the phonetics and phonology of MC present autochthonous characteristics, conservative features (of Old Catalan), and also features of other Romance languages with which the variety was in early contact ‐ Occitan and Italian. The presence in MC of autochthonous and conservative characteristics is unsurprising if we take into consideration the peripheral and isolated status of MC with respect to the dialects spoken in the mainland: the relative isolation of this variety is a likely reason why conservative features