Relevance and attribution in the intonation of Gran Canaria Spanish interrogatives Francisco Vizcaíno-Ortega, Mercedes Cabrera-Abreu * Departamento de Filología Moderna, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, C/ Pérez del Toro, 1, 35004 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain Received 1 August 2011; received in revised form 3 May 2012; accepted 19 May 2012 Abstract An insightful account of the mechanisms which underlie the association of prosodic patterns with pragmatic meanings is absent in most descriptions of the prosody of interrogative utterances in Spanish. The approach in Escandell-Vidal (1998) for European Peninsular Spanish responds by appealing to the linguistic distinction neutral/marked for interrogatives, together with the concepts relevance and attribution as used in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995). Our present study, analysing further data from Gran Canaria Spanish interrogatives (based on Cabrera-Abreu and Vizcaíno-Ortega, 2010) in the light of Relevance Theory, reveals that such a linguistic distinction requires an explicit statement as to whether it applies prosodically (marked/unmarked tunes) or pragmatically (neutral/non-neutral meanings). In addition, the restrictive behaviour proposed for attribution (it correlates with marked intonation patterns only, and its type is tightly bound to a single intonation pattern) must be relaxed in order to accommodate the cases of the unmarked intonation tune, and of a single marked tune charged with two different attribution types. The resulting framework enables us to understand better the nature of interrogative meanings and tunes, together with their actual mappings; to predict potential tune-meaning associations; and to exclude ill-formed tune-meaning connections. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Interrogative meanings; Nuclear tunes; Relevance; Attribution; Markedness; Gran Canaria Spanish 1. Introduction A review of the existing literature on the intonation of questions in Canarian Spanish reveals that its investigation has been devoted mostly to a description of the shape of intonational contours (Quilis, 1989; Sosa, 1999; Dorta, 2000, 2005; Dorta et al., 2009; Cabrera-Abreu and Vizcaíno-Ortega, 2003; Vizcaíno-Ortega et al., 2007; Cabrera-Abreu and Vizcaíno-Ortega, 2010). Thus, while there is extensive research on the form of intonation, there are relatively few studies (Cabrera-Abreu and Vizcaíno-Ortega, 2010; Vizcaíno-Ortega and Cabrera-Abreu, 2011) that examine in a systematic fashion the relationship between the form and meaning of intonation in questions of this Spanish dialectal variety. Even in those cases in which authors associate tunes with meanings (Cabrera-Abreu and Vizcaíno-Ortega, 2010), no specific semantico-pragmatic theoretical framework has been provided that accounts in a unified manner for the different types of interrogatives. Specifically, the mechanisms whereby a certain tune can convey a wide range of meanings while other tunes are highly restricted in their pragmatic interpretation should be made explicit. In order to offer a satisfactory account of the complex behaviour of interrogatives, the traditional approach which provides a descriptive list of tunes followed by a list of their possible meanings falls short of answering the following question: what are the cognitive mechanisms which a native speaker employs in order to communicate effectively when she matches the form and function of prosody successfully? www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1219--1239 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 928 451719; fax: +34 928 451701. E-mail addresses: fvizcaino@dfm.ulpgc.es (F. Vizcaíno-Ortega), mcabrera@dfm.ulpgc.es (M. Cabrera-Abreu). 0378-2166/$ -- see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.05.014