Lack of Syllable Duration as a Post-Lexical Acoustic Cue in Spanish in Contact with Maya

Nuria Martínez García,Melanie Uth

doi:10.3390/languages4040084

Abstract

This paper focuses on the duration of stressed syllables in broad versus contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish and examines its connection with Spanish–Maya bilingualism. We examine the claim that phonemic vowel length in one language prevents the use of syllable duration as a post-lexical acoustic cue in another. We study the duration of stressed syllables of nouns in subject and object position in subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences (broad and contrastive focus) of a semi-spontaneous production task. One thousand one hundred and twenty-six target syllables of 34 mono- and bilingual speakers were measured and submitted to linear mixed-effects models. Although the target syllables were slightly longer in contrastive focus, duration was not significant, nor was the effect of bilingualism. The results point to duration not constituting a cue to focus marking in Yucatecan Spanish. Finally, it is discussed how this result relates to the strong influence of Yucatec Maya on Yucatecan Spanish prosody observed by both scholars and native speakers of Yucatecan Spanish and other Mexican varieties of Spanish.

Highlights

The main aim of this article is to investigate whether the speakers of Yucatecan Spanish make use of post-lexical duration as an acoustic cue in order to mark contrastive focus
We studied the duration of stressed syllables of nouns in subject and object position in 1126 SVO sentences of a semi-spontaneous production task run with 34 mono- and bilingual speakers in Quintana Roo, Mexico
The main result of the study is that, slightly longer in contrastive focus, syllable duration turned out not to be a significant variable in our data set, suggesting that duration does not constitute a cue to focus marking in Yucatecan Spanish

Summary

Introduction

The main aim of this article is to investigate whether the speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (in Quintana Roo, Mexico) make use of post-lexical duration as an acoustic cue in order to mark contrastive focus. 248–54; Zubizarreta 1998, 1999), and the references cited therein In this tradition, the notion of contrastive focus (CFOC in (1)) may be, and generally is, used to refer to corrective focus, that is, “when the focus marks a constituent that is a direct rejection of an alternative, either spoken by the speaker himself [ . The notion of information focus is used in order to refer to the new, non-presupposed information of a sentence in the sense of Halliday (1967). The notion of narrow focus is used whenever a single constituent of a sentence is non-contrastively focalized, whereas broad focus (BFOC in (2)) is used whenever “there is no particular constituent which is focused (or, alternatively, the entire expression is considered the focus constituent)” The notion of narrow focus is used whenever a single constituent of a sentence is non-contrastively focalized, whereas broad focus (BFOC in (2)) is used whenever “there is no particular constituent which is focused (or, alternatively, the entire expression is considered the focus constituent)” (Gussenhoven 2007, p. 91), as in (2)

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Conclusion