Is there a prosodic accommodation in the final falling contours of Pola Siero’s absolute interrogatives?

Abstract

This paper investigates the final Pola de Siero’s contours in absolute interrogatives. We carried out 24 surveys of situations using the methodology of Interactive Atlas of Spanish Intonation, with examples of various intonation contours, which are employed to encode different semantic nuances. The 24 subjects of our corpus were selected taking into account three social variables (age, education and sex)2. We aim to address one question in this study: is there a correlation between social factors and the final contours of Pola de Siero in absolute interrogatives? We found that 21 informants in our survey show a tendency towards the final falling contours in absolute interrogatives, a salient feature of northern Spanish, which contrasts with the final rises in Standard Peninsular Spanish (three informants). As a consequence of this, we could say that this prosodic feature is a relevant one in our corpus and that it seems there is not an Asturian prosodic accommodation in absolute interrogatives; this pattern is not acquired by Spanish speakers who have family in Burgos or Valladolid.