Prenuclear Low Tone Alignment in Dominican Spanish Erik W. Willis New Mexico State University E-mail: erikw@nmsu.edu ABSTRACT Spanish prenuclear rising pitch accents have been described as having a Low tone consistently aligned near the onset of the tonic syllable and a High tone, whose alignment may vary depending on focus marking. An examination of Dominican Spanish (DS) reveals a previously unreported alignment pattern for Spanish. The DS data reveals a variable Low tone alignment; an early alignment near the tonic onset, and a late Low alignment, past the tonic midpoint, typically 100-180 ms into the tonic syllable. The High tone does not demonstrate two categories of alignment seen with the Low tone. The variation observed in the DS prenuclear pitch accent alignments provide clear evidence of intonational dialectal variation and contributes to the growing body of research on intonational variation in general. 1. INTRODUCTION Pitch accent tonal alignment refers to the location of a valley or tonal peak with respect to a syllable boundary. Researchers in many languages have noted and described contrastive pitch accents based on the tonal alignment of the F0 contour with the lexically stressed syllable. Most previous reports of Low tone alignment of prenuclear rising pitch accents in Spanish note a Low tone that occurs near the onset of the tonic syllable (see Figure 1a) [2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 17]. There are only two reports of a Spanish prenuclear rising pitch accent with a Low tone that occurs late in the tonic syllable; both reports were for Caribbean dialects of Spanish [2, 15]. Figure 1: Schematic of rising pitch accents in Peninsular Spanish. Previous reports of Spanish contrastive focus in prenuclear pitch accents find that the Low tone is likewise consistently aligned near the onset of the tonic syllable, and that the alignment of the High tone realized within the tonic syllable serves to indicate contrastive focus [3, 4, 5, 8, 13]. Based on these findings, it has been assumed that there are two Spanish prenuclear rising pitch accents which were distinguished by the alignment of the High tone (see Figure 1). Only recently has tonal alignment been applied to dialectal studies with positive results. It has been reported that different dialects of English resolve tonal clash environments differently [7]. Serbian and Croatian dialects have been distinguished based on tonal alignment in response to specific focus conditions [14]. The Belgrade dialect with a contrastive lexical pitch accent shows a relatively consistent tonal alignment despite variations of focus conditions (broad and narrow focus). However, the Zagreb dialect, which has lost the lexical pitch accent distinction between rising and falling tones, demonstrates a significant modification of tonal alignment under broad and narrow focus conditions [14]. Recently, it has been reported that there are small but significant differences in tonal alignment of Northern and Southern German speakers [1]. Finally, two Pisa Italian dialects have been differentiated based on the alignments of specific tones [6]. This paper examines the tonal alignment of prenuclear rising pitch accents in Dominican Spanish (DS) spoken in Santiago de los Caballeros, in the “Cibao” region of the country of the Dominican Republic. The findings indicate that there are two distinct alignments for the prenuclear Low tone in DS. 2. PROCEDURE The data for the current study is based on a corpus of declaratives produced with broad focus and contrastive focus by four female speakers of DS (a total of 288 declarative utterances). The speakers were all volunteers and students of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCCM). In all cases, the speakers were volunteers and were naive as to the purpose of the study. The informants for the experimental data all fit a particular sociolinguistic characterization determined from a brief biographical survey conducted prior to the experiment, which is necessary when addressing dialectal variation. The experimental corpus findings are corroborated by data from spontaneous speech conversations by additional speakers. 15th ICPhS Barcelona 2941 ISBN 1-876346-48-5 © 2003 UAB