| The primary goal of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive account of the prosodic cues used to signal questions in Manchego Peninsular Spanish, a dialect spoken in the south-central region of mainland Spain. Specifically, this dissertation is an experimental analysis of the intonation of declarative questions, wh-questions, and declarative statements produced by 16 speakers of this dialect of Spanish and aims to account for surface fundamental frequency (F0) variability by adhering to principles in stylistic variation and autosegmental prosodic structure. It also works within the framework of empirical research on how the question vs. statement contrast is conveyed cross-linguistically and responds to issues in the syntax-prosody interface underlying question signaling generally. The dissertation is motivated by three broad research goals. The first goal is to investigate whether task-based phonetic and/or phonological differences are observed for the set of declarative question and wh-question F0 contours attested and whether stylistic implications can be inferred based on the speech style in which a particular contour is uttered. The second goal is to provide a phonological analysis of the F0 gestures of which each question contour is comprised. Working within the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonational phonology, a tonal analysis is provided for utterance-initial peaks in wh-questions and utterance-final rises and falls in declarative questions and wh-questions, respectively. The final goal is to determine how each of the contours attested for declarative questions and wh-questions reflects the set of phonetic-acoustic properties known to communicate questions universally. To do this, we compare the acoustic correlates of each question contour with those of declarative statements. The findings provide strong evidence that question intonation is a feature of speech communication with surface forms that are largely susceptible to variability at the phonetic, phonological, sociolinguistic, dialectal, and even individual levels. |
