La entonación interrogativa del español en la frontera México-EEUU de América: comparación de tres corpus de habla de informantes texanos con estudios superiores

Abstract

AbstractThe objective of this work is analysing absolute interrogative sentences from the Spanish of San Antonio de Texas using three corpus featuring different levels of spontaneity (formal ad hoc, situational and conversational), and uttered by native speakers with superior studies. The choice of these corpus and their acoustic analyses have been performed according to the methodology established by the international project AMPER (Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman). Furthermore, we have undertaken the phonetic-phonological labelling of the boundary tones and of initial and nuclear pitch accents within the framework of the autosegmental-metrical model. This study has been carried out with the aim of contributing to the knowledge of Texan intonation, in order to make comparisons with other varieties of Spanish language as well as to include it in the international Atlas AMPER. We hypothesize that interrogatives from the informants considered follow the patterns described for Mexican interrogatives (Sosa, 1999; Ávila, 2003; Martín Butragueño, 2004, among others), taking into account the geographical location of San Antonio de Texas in relation to Mexico and the influence of Mexican immigration, which has a strong presence in San Antonio. Results provide evidence of such influence, particularly in the final ascent of the F0.