The intonation of wh-in situ questions in Northern Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

This project investigates the intonational characteristics of wh-in situ questions (As in: ¿Compraste qué? ‘You bought what?) in Northern Peninsular Spanish. Although these questions reportedly occur with various pragmatic readings in several Spanish dialects (Uribe-Etxebarria 2002; Chernova 2013; Reglero and Ticio 2013), their intonation remains to be investigated. Data from 22 speakers from Northern Peninsular Spanish was collected in a reading and an elicitation task. Each task included 30 contextualized wh-in situ questions representing information-seeking, echo-repetition, and echo-surprise readings. Target sentences were interspersed among declaratives and yes–no questions. Preliminary results from the elicitation task are discussed for two female participants. Prevalent pitch contours are analyzed following Spanish ToBi conventions (Face and Prieto 2007). In addition, we report the global tonal range for each type of wh-in situ, as well as the tonal range average from the nuclear tone to the boundary tone. It is expected that surprise contexts will have the greatest tonal range, followed by echo-repetition contexts. Finally, we explore the prevalence of intermediate phrases prior to the final wh-word for the three contexts, which might have repercussions for the syntactic analysis of wh-in situ in Spanish (Uribe-Etxebarria 2002 vs. Reglero and Ticio 2013).