Yes-No Question Intonation in Puerto Rican Spanish and Beijing Mandarin

• Other Authors: Zhang, Linxi (authoraut)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: Linguistics
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_2017SP_Zhang_fsu_0071N_13873

The intonation of Yes-No questions in Puerto Rican and other Caribbean varieties of Spanish has provoked great interest of the investigators, partly because of its unique circumflex contour that is different from the final rising contour common in other dialects (Sosa 1999; Armstrong 2010, 2012). Previous researches have also shown that in PR Spanish, the nuclear accent in echo-Yes-No questions that express surprise or ask for confirmation are represented with different tones than the information-seeking questions (Armstrong 2010). On the other hand, the Yes-No questions in Mandarin Chinese have been studied more for its syntactic variations. Two syntactic structures are believed to be alternative in the formation of Chinese information-seeking Yes-No questions: 1) the use of the sentence-final particle ma, known as the question marker and 2) the A-Not-A structure (Huang et.al, 2009). Nonetheless, little is known about syntactic variation across pragmatic contexts and the intonation of the questions (Lee 2000, 2005). The present study aims to investigate, above all, the intonational differences in Yes-No questions of four different pragmatic purposes: information-seeking, echo-surprise, confirmatory, and echo-repetition, in PR Spanish and Beijing Mandarin Chinese. It also considers any syntactic variation across the question types, especially in Chinese. Lastly, it considers the effect of different degrees of bilingualism of the participants on their intonation. For the study, an elicitation task with visual and audio guidance by means of a PowerPoint is used. The task has a Spanish section and a Chinese section. Each section consists of 20 contexts triggering Yes-No questions. Target items are divided into 4 blocks corresponding to the four contests. Spanish results show that as expected, most of the utterances were realized with falling intonation. At the same time, there are intonational differences among questions of different pragmatic contexts. Contradicting previous literature on PRS intonation (Armstrong 2010, Sosa 1999), the ´circumflex ´structure is preferred in information-seeking, confirmatory, and echo-repetition contexts, while echo-surprise context favors H*LL% final contour. In terms of bilingualism, the Spanish dominant speaker shows greater intonational variation across questions types. Some instances of rising intonation are attested probably due to influence of English or other varieties of Spanish. Chinese results show syntactic variations in the questions of different pragmatic contexts. The ma particle structure is favored in information-seeking and echo-repetition contexts, while A-not-A structure is preferred in confirmatory context. Yes-no question is scarcely found in echo-surprise context. In terms of intonation, there are effects of presence of particle and narrow focus. . === A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the Master of Arts. === Spring Semester 2017. === April 07, 2017. === Beijing Mandarin, Bilingualism, Intonation, Phonology-Syntax interface, Puerto Rican Spanish, Yes-no questions === Includes bibliographical references. === Carolina González, Professor Directing Thesis; Lara Reglero, Committee Member; Antje Muntendam, Committee Member.