Acoustic analysis of tonicity of relative words in indefinite free relative constructions

Authors

Keywords:

Stress, Relative words, Indefinite free relatives, Tonicity

Abstract

Relatives in indefinite free relatives (No tiene con quien hablar ‘He doesn’t have anybody to talk to’) are sometimes considered stressed and sometimes as unstressed. Our aim is to analize the nature of the accent in this kind of relative words in order to determine, by measuring the acoustic correlates of stress (intensity, duration and frequency), if these relative words are stressed or unstressed. We have carried out an acoustic and statistical analysis of the data with Praat and SPSS programs. Our results shows, in the first place, that interrogatives and relatives are not so different in tonicity, as the only parameter which allows to differenciate between them is duration, and just in the case of who and when. In the second place, the intensity values of the relatives that appear in indefinite free relatives are similar to the values stressed controls (interrogatives), specially the pronoun que, but this kind of data is very complex and shows a lot of variation.

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Published

2017-02-15

How to Cite

Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E., Pérez Ocón, P., & Polo Cano, N. (2017). Acoustic analysis of tonicity of relative words in indefinite free relative constructions. Journal of Experimental Phonetics, 26, 165–195. Retrieved from https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/experimentalphonetics/article/view/44070

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Vol. 26 (2017)

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