El tono fundamental y la duración: dos aspectos de la taxonomía prosódica en dos modalidades de habla (enunciativa e interrogativa) del español

Abstract

This study establishes, in the first place, a general taxonomy of pitch and duration structures –two of the parameters responsible for Spanish prosody– both in declaratives and interrogatives in the pretoneme of sentences produced under laboratory conditions.  Secondly, it relates the resulting structures to the position of stress in the sentence, both in the pretoneme and in the toneme. Results are obtained following a rigorous, automatic methodology that we propose. This methodology is based, on the one hand, on the theoretical postulates of the Autosegmental Metrical Theory (AM) and, on the other, on the selected psychoacoustic thresholds. These indicate that, for pitch, the structure L*+H is not the only one that can be found in the pretoneme (e.g., in the third tonal accent of the sentence, the presence of H* structures is important in accordance with the general downstep of the sentence). As for duration, the commonest structure is G*. In the toneme, syllables present a larger duration than in any other pretonemic position.