La entonacion del espanol

Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Pilar Prieto Vives

Juan Manuel Sosa: La entonacion del espanol. Madrid: Catedra, 1999. 264 pp.

Sosa's book, a long-awaited study based on his outstanding doctoral dissertation Fonetica y fonologia de la entonacion del espanol hispanoamericano (Sosa 1991), has come as a very agreeable surprise to scholars interested in Spanish prosody. Ever since Navarro-Tomas and Quilis published their seminal research on Peninsular Spanish, the study of intonation has occupied a rather marginal position within the discipline of Hispanic linguistics. The present book is bound to redress this situation by calling attention to this currently burgeoning facet of linguistic theory. The main goal of Sosa's book is to investigate the phonological properties of the intonation contours of several Spanish dialects. Its first positive aspect lies in its descriptive side, for it takes into account a wide pool of data from different Spanish dialects. As the author notes in the first chapter, the basic materials for this project were collected from hours of recording natural conversations from different dialects: "Para este estudio de la entonacion del espanol hemos utilizado como fuente principal de datos, nuestro extenso corpus constituido de varios centenares de horas de conversaciones, entrevistas y cuestionarios orales grabados de distintas variedades del espanol, provenientes de la mayor parte de los paises hispanoamericanos ademas de Espania" (p. 91). The second asset of the present study resides in its strong theoretical basis. Sosa adopts one of the most widely recognized phonological approaches to intonation, namely, the autosegmental-metrical approach -- the reader can find an introduction to this model in Pierrehumbert's (1980) thesis and, more recently, in Ladd's (1996) book. This study can thus be considered the first full-fledged application of the metrical model to Spanish intonation and a necessary starting-point for subsequent work in this area.

The book is coherently divided into three main chapters. Sosa devotes the first chapter to a very clear and informed introduction to intonation, which may be quite useful for any student of prosody or any reader with a general background in linguistics. The author discusses topics such as the relationship between intonation and phrasing, the factors that influence phrasing decisions in discourse, and the interaction between intonation and stress. Finally, after an overview of some relatively recent contributions to the analysis of Spanish intonation, Sosa proceeds to review the main principles and assumptions underlying Pierrehumbert's (1980) metrical model of intonation. In a way, the first chapter serves to lay out and motivate the theoretical assumptions adopted in the second chapter, which constitutes the core analytical part of the book. In this chapter, Sosa presents a descriptive analysis of Spanish

intonation, taking the metrical model as its main theoretical basis; he also provides a number of well-grounded and insightful observations about the phonological patterning of different Spanish contour types. The third chapter compares a selection of intonation contours of three sentence types (declarative, yes-no questions, and wh questions) produced in several Spanish dialects, concluding that the differences found between them are phonological in nature (rather than phonetic, as was previously claimed). Finally, the Epilogo summarizes the main conclusions of the book and its implications for intonation theory.

As far as the methodology is concerned, Sosa acknowledges the importance of taking into account the two complementary aspects of this prosodic feature, namely, its phonological and its phonetic side: "Dada la complicada naturaleza estructural y la multiplicidad de funciones que cumple la entonacion, una mera descripcion de su sustancia sin referencia a lo linguistico seria inadecuada e insuficiente, tanto como las referencias funcionales aprioristicas que no incluyen precisiones con respecto a como se manifiestan esas funciones en su forma fonica" (p. 247). Hence, the book is very careful to provide the reader with the [F.sub.o] contour of each of the sentences it analyzes, together with a general description of the meaning it conveys.

In this review I would like to briefly discuss three of Sosa's proposals regarding the phonological structure of Spanish intonation. I take these proposals to be important criticisms to standard assumptions of the metrical framework, whose resolution may condition the development of the model and its further application to other Romance languages.

Sosa's primary concern in chapter two is to examine the phonological properties of Spanish intonation contours within the metrical model. To accomplish this, he first analyzes acoustically a selection of Spanish tunes and then proceeds to advance an inventory of phonological pitch accents and boundary tones (the main building blocks of intonation contours) that can account for the tonal variation found in this language. Within the metrical model, phrase-final tones can be of two types: phrase accents (associated with the limits of intermediate phrase boundaries) and boundary tones (associated with the limits of intonational phrase boundaries). Moreover, the two tonal events display different association patterns with the segmental material: while boundary tones are always linked to the end of intonation-phrase boundaries, phrase accents describe the tonal trajectory between the nuclear accent and the limits of the prosodic domain (cf. Pierrehumbert 1980: 32). Sosa (1991 and the volume under review) claims that phrase accents could be eliminated entirely from the tonal inventory of languages where the intonation nucleus is always placed at the end of the intonation group. According to Sosa, "es oportuno mencionar que la nocion de acento de frase puede ser menos util, incluso superflua, en lenguas como el frances, el espanol y demas lenguas de nucleo fijo. En estas lenguas, el ultimo acento tonal no puede estar muy lejos del borde derecho de la frase, por lo que un eventual acento de frase no podria generar ningun tipo de contraste" (Sosa 1991: 69; Sosa under review p. 87). "En general, no puede haber mils de dos silabas (inacentuadas) despues del ultimo acento tonal, y excepcionalmente tres. Por esta circunstancia, el ultimo acento tonal no puede estar muy lejos del tono de juntura, por lo cual un acento de frase, de cualquiera de los dos tipos (H- o L-), no podria generar ningun tipo de contraste" (p. 95).