Prosody and Meaning in Interaction: The Case of the Spanish Discourse Functional Unit entonces ‘then’

It is widely accepted in the literature that Discourse Functional Units (a.k.a. discourse markers, connectors, pragmatic particles) often show prosodic properties of separate intonation units and are also phonologically reduced. In this paper we investigate these hypotheses in the use of entonces ‘then’ in spoken Castilian Spanish. Acoustic measurements show that entonces is not an independent prosodic unit in the sense established by [10] and that it appears to be more closely linked to the following proposition than to the preceding one. The F0 contour of entonces is conditioned by the type of argument expressed in the proposition following it. The results also indicate that there is no significant phonological reduction in the use of entonces in the majority of cases.