On Intonation’s Relationship with Pragmatic Meaning in Spanish

The majority of studies addressing Spanish intonation, including work dating as far back as that of Navarro Tomás (1918, 1944) as well as studies conducted using the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology (Ladd 1996, Pierrehumbert 1980, Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988), have dealt with declaratives or interrogatives produced in a laboratory setting. Such laboratory speech has been elicited via techniques such as reading sentences, story retelling, dialogue games and map tasks (Face 2003). Although much has been learned regarding the phonetics and phonology of laboratory speech declaratives in Spanish, most previous studies, until very recently, have ignored the intonation of spontaneous speech. Face’s (2003) study, which is one of the few accounts of spontaneous speech intonation in Spanish, shows that distinct phonetic trends occur in this more natural speech style’s declaratives, when compared to those of laboratory speech. He shows why such studies are crucial to understanding intonation by stating, “but while lab speech is invaluable in intonational studies, it cannot be assumed that the intonation patterns produced in lab speech are an accurate representation of the intonation patterns of spontaneous speech” due to the “intertwining factors in spontaneous speech that can affect the intonation of an utterance” (Face 2003:116). The “intertwining factors” refer to aspects such as emotions, turn-taking, and consideration of the other interlocutor, among others, that appear in natural speech and not in more scripted speech styles. Moreover, an interesting idea arises from the results of this study in the form of a proposal for future research, which is exploring the relationship between intonation and pragmatic meaning in spontaneous speech. The present study, which uses this research proposal as a point of departure, investigates the phonetic properties and phonological phrasing of declaratives belonging to the five pragmatic categories of speech acts set forth by Searle (1977): representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. These five categories are defined as follows: representatives are subjective assertions or beliefs about the world, such as an opinion of the United States government; directives are used to get the hearer to perform an action, meaning they are a type of indirect imperative, such as someone stating their need for money to their parents due to too many monthly expenses; commissives are promises, such as someone assuring their friend they will be at a party; expressives reveal inner states of speakers that do not convey anything new about the world, such as apologies or congratulatory remarks; declarations signal changes in a state of affairs, such as a woman telling her boyfriend that she would like to end their relationship. Specifically, the goals are to determine if the phonetic properties explored by Face (2003) (downstepping, final lowering, fundamental frequency (F0) rises through stressed syllables and F0 peak alignment) are manifested differently based on pragmatic context. In terms of phonological phrasing choices in unscripted speech, the goal of this paper is to evaluate a part of the MIN-N-PHP (rapid speech) constraint proposed by Prieto (2004) in her investigation of laboratory speech, which posits that a maximum of four prosodic words (PWs) can be contained within a phonological phrase (PPh). This constraint is a