Verb tonal structure

1
INTERROGATIVE INTONATIONAND VARIABILITY IN SOME
TARRAGONA, BARCELONA, LLEIDA AND TORTOSA
DIALECTS OF CATALAN Dorota T. Szmidt, Sabela
Labraña Universitat de Barcelona
Acknowledgement MCI, ref. FFI2009-09309/FILO
Methodology 54 information-seeking yes-no
questions for each dialect (3 repetitions of a
set of 18 sentences including 9 with an expansion
in the subject SSCVO and 9 with an expansion
in the object SVOOC). Female speakers
(between 25 50 years old) without university
education. Goldwave, AMPER06, PRAAT.
The AMPER project The AMPER Project, promoted by
the Centre de Dialectologie at the
Stendhal-Grenoble3 University (France) since the
1990s, aims to describe and assign different
prosodic samples of Romance languages to an
extensive multimedia atlas (Contini, 2005). In
Catalonia, the development of the project for
Spanish and Catalan (both being co-official
languages in this region) under the direction of
E. Martínez Celdrán is known as AMPERCAT.
Goal Comparison of the intonation patterns of
information-seeking yes-no questions in four
Catalan dialects Lleida, Tortosa, Tarragona and
Barcelona.
Results

Verb tonal structure (absolute values in Hz)
Barcelona
Tarragona
Lleida and Tortosa
Pre-tonic syllable Tonic syllable Post-tonic syllable
Lleida 281 214 275
Tortosa 255 210 191
Tarragona 200 180 160
Barcelona 280 275 225
SSCVO El capità protestant no porta el
passaport?
SSCVO
Pre-tonic syllable Tonic syllable Post-tonic syllable
Lleida 303 233 292
Tortosa 279 226 202
Tarragona 225 200 175
Barcelona 280 280 255
SVOOC El capità no porta el passaport
pintoresc?
SVOOC

• Conclusion
• As far as pitch is concerned, all four dialects
  have an rising nucleus and present variability in
  pre-nucleus.
• 2. All dialects present the first peak in the
  subject in SSCVO sentences whereas in SVOOC
  sentences F0 rises throughout the subject and
  reaches the first peak in the verb. The Lleida
  dialect is distinguished from the others by the
  inclusion of additional peaks in each instance.
• 3. The principal differences between all dialects
  are in the verb structure. In Tortosa and
  Barcelona dialects, the verb is accented in
  SSCVO and SVOOC sentences. In Tarragona
  dialect it is also accented in SVOOC sentences
  but deaccented in the SSCVOC sentences. In
  Lleida dialect, we observe a sharp fall in the
  tonic syllable that results in 2 peaks in the
  verb, on the tonic and post-tonic syllables..
• 4. As for the duration and intensity, the
  increment of the duration in the final syllables
  compensates for their minor intensity.

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