Convergence and intonation: historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish

COLANTONI, L. AND GURLEKIAN, J. A.

BILINGUALISM: Language and Cognition

Cambridge University Press

Lugar: Cambridge (Inglaterra); Año: 2004 vol. 7 p. 107 - 119

1366-7289

In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization  of pre nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignements, Buenos Aires Spanish display early peak alignements. The alignement pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative uterances is not tottaly foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite diferent function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance final intonational phrases, where a pronunced tendency for down stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian inmigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from italian. As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.