Is there a Spanish imperative intonation revisited: local considerations

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to reexamine the existence of an imperative intonation in Spanish by investigating acoustic cues at the local pitch-accent level. Navarro Tomas (1974 [1944]) claims that intonation alone is sufficient to distinguish between declarative and imperative sentences. Kvavik (1987, 1988) finds inconclusive evidence for the claim that intonation can distinguish between the two types of sentence for a Cuban dialect of Spanish based on global or utterance-level correlates. In the present study, intonational differences are examined at the local pitch-accent level with a larger corpus of Mexican Spanish. The current study finds that speakers differ in their use of local intonational strategies between imperative and declarative utterances, but that the results are not categorical. The local differences between imperative and declarative utterances include an increased tonal range at the local pitch-accent level, reduced intonational deaccenting, an increased use of an early H tone pitch accent associated with contrastive focus, and modifications of duration.