Rising in the intonation of Valdivian Spanish: examples

Abstract

Based on the notion that: 1) the ‘intonational sentence’ is made up of tone units sequentially organized; 2) tone units are related to grammatical and communicative functions, an inventory of the rising movements and their related functions is presented, as they were observed in a representative corpus of Valdivian Spanish in a interview situation (in the south of Chile).

The corpus, which included subjects of three social strata, three age groups, and both sexes, was analized from a linguistic, sociolinguistic, and statistical point of view, on the basis of an auditory perceptual transcription, which was later acoustically validated according to the results obtained.

The results show that rising has low, mid, and high realizations that rise stepwise or as glides. The highest frequency of use was observed in the modality of inconclusiveness: 1) with the grammatical function of a boundary marker at word, phrase, and clause level; 2) with a communicative-expressive function of inconclusiveness, suspense, deemphasis, or familiarity. The sociolinguistic analysis showed a complex set of variation and tendencies of use conditioned by the social variables of stratum, age, and sex.