Grave vs. agudo in two dialects of Spanish: a study in voice register and intonation

Abstract

Spanish intonation has been described by several authors and linguists with a variety of subjective terms. Those adjectives which recur most frequently are GRAVE and AGUDO. Grave, which seems to mean ‘low pitch’, is assigned mainly to the dialects of northern Spain and especially to Castilian; agudo, on the other hand, seems to mean ‘high pitch’ and is frequently used to describe the dialects of Spanish America. In this article some objective data will be presented on voice register and intonation in two dialects of Spanish, those of Madrid and Mexico City, as a first step in clarifying the use of these two subjective terms. The results of research presented here are based on tape-recorded interviews with native Spanish speakers and an electronic analysis of those recordings by the Léon-Martin pitch extractor at the University of Toronto.