Relative clauses in Spanish: some suprasegmental characteristics

Abstract

In Garro & Parker (1982), we investigated the suprasegmental characteristics of relative clauses in English. The present study is (a) an extension of the same investigative procedure to Spanish, and (b) a comparison of the Spanish data with that already obtained for English. As before, we varied clause type (restrictive/non-restrictive), word order within the clause (SVO/OSV), and relative pronouns to determine if predictable characteristics of relative clauses are a function of the different syntactic configurations of the two clause types. Two speakers of River Plate Spanish produced the sentence: Los gigolós que prefieren rubias son veleidosos and all grammatical permutations of the embedded clause, in three conditions (136 tokens). From spectrograms of each token, we made three measurements: f 0 fluctuation and vowel length in the head NP of the clause and in the last word in the clause, and the pause length preceding and following the clause. A comparison of the results with those obtained for English suggest four conclusions: (1) relative clauses in both languages exhibit systematic suprasegmental characteristics which can be described in terms of vowel length, pause length, and f 0 contours; (2) the major factor affecting these intonational characteristics is clause type; (3) a secondary factor is word order; (4) suprasegmental variations are determined by syntactic structure, not by superficial, lexical variables.