ToBI

Prieto, Pilar; Borràs-Comes, Joan; Cabré, Teresa; Crespo-Sendra, Verònica; Mascaró, Ignasi; Roseano, Paolo; Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu & Vanrell, Maria del Mar (to appear: 2014): “Intonational phonology of Catalan and its dialectal varieties”, in: Frota, Sónia and Prieto, Pilar (Eds.): Intonational variation in Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This chapter describes the intonation and prosodic phrasing patterns which characterize the main dialects of the Catalan language (namely Central Catalan, Northwestern Catalan, Valencian, Balearic Catalan, Northern Catalan, and Alguerese Catalan) from a Romance perspective. The analysis will be framed in the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework, and a Cat_ToBI analysis of the data will be proposed that is valid for all Catalan dialectal varieties and which takes into consideration the labeling proposals presented for other Romance languages. Importantly, this investigation will be the first to analyze prosodically the major and traditionally accepted dialects that compose the Catalan-speaking territory in a balanced way. The analysis is based on the data available online at the Atles interactiu de l’entonació del català (Prieto & Cabré coords 2007-2012) and in the recent analysis presented in book format by the authors L’entonació dels dialectes catalans (Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2012). The empirical basis of the investigation includes a large-scale intonation survey collection in 69 different Catalan locales from these dialectal areas. Two middle-aged educated women were interviewed in each locale (with a total of 142 interviews, as 6 women were recorded in L’Alguer) and responded to the original and larger version of the common intonation survey used for all languages included in this volume. This survey is based on the Discourse Completion Test methodology, which is designed for eliciting different types of utterances (roughly 50 contours per locale) through an inductive method in which the researcher presents the subject with a series of everyday situations (such as “You go into a shop you have never been in before and ask the shop assistant if they sell tangerines”) and then asks him or her to respond accordingly. The first par of the chapter will be devoted to review the recent literature on Catalan prosody, which in the last decades has been intensively analyzed from a prosodic point of view. The central part of the chapter will compare the realization of different dialects realizations of the different sentence types covered in all chapters, namely, statements, yes-no questions, wh-questions, requests/orders, and vocatives. With respect to statements, all dialects are characterized by a falling nuclear pitch configuration L* L%, with the exception of Northern Catalan and Alguerese, which have a H+L* L% configuration (the former with an optional initial accent). Yes-no and wh-questions display interesting types of intonational variation, both from a pragmatic and from a dialectal point of view. For example, information-seeking yes-no questions display two distinct intonation patterns, depending on the dialect. Roughly, a falling nuclear configuration H+L* L% characterizes yes-no questions in Balearic, Northwestern, and Alguerese Catalan (which are Catalan dialectal areas which display archaic linguistic traits), while a rising nuclear configuration L* H% characterizes the rest of the dialects. Interestingly, other Romance dialects such as Sardinian, Galician, or Caribbean Spanish also display the falling intonational configuration for questions. As will be explained in the chapter, the prosody of wh-questions and vocatives is also interesting from a dialectal point of view. The chapter will end by presenting: (a) commonalities and differences found with other Romance languages; and (b) an inclusive Cat_ToBI proposal which takes into consideration the labeling options presented for other Romance languages.