Intonational marking of contrastive focus in Madrid Spanish

Previous studies give a somewhat puzzling picture of the intonational correlates of Spanish narrow focus, and in some cases there are significant inconsistencies across studies. This dissertation is an experimental study of the ways in which intonation is used to mark narrow, contrastive focus in Madrid Spanish. The intonational correlates of contrastive focus found in this dissertation are described phonetically and analyzed phonologically within the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonational phonology.; Local markings (i.e. on the word in focus) are a focal L+H* pitch accent and the use of an intermediate phrase boundary tone (H- or L-) at the right edge of the word in contrastive focus. The typically broad focus L*+H pitch accent is also used in cases of contrastive focus, though the height of the fundamental frequency (F0) peak is higher in these cases than when it is used in broad focus utterances.; Global (i.e. not on the focal word) intonational marking of contrastive focus in Madrid Spanish is done primarily through pitch range. There is an expanded pitch range in pre-focal position which causes the F0 peak immediately preceding the focal word to be higher than in other cases, and this pitch range expansion sometimes affects other pre-focal F0 peaks as well. Post-focally there is a gradient pitch range reduction which lowers the height of F0 peaks, sometimes to the extreme that no peak is visible in a pitch track. Besides Pitch range, another global marking is the use of a pre-focal H- at the edge of the major syntactic constituent containing the contrastively focused word.; Also considered are cases where the focal word is part of a multi-word syntactic constituent. In these cases contrastive focus is marked locally on the word in focus, and an intermediate phrase boundary tone (usually L-) is realized at the end of the entire constituent. When the entire syntactic constituent, rather than just one of its words, is produced in contrastive focus, the end of the constituent is marked with an intermediate phrase boundary tone, but there is generally no focal marking on any one particular word in the constituent.