A Comparative Analysis of Declarative Sentences in the Spontaneous Speech of Two Puerto Rican Communities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Methodology:

1.       It is necessary to explain why the work is only performed with men and why women are not included.

2.       Examples of the sentences analyzed should be included, and their length should be discussed.

3.       Explain the number of sentences according to the stress on the nuclear syllable, i.e., describe how many oxytones and paroxytones are found in the corpus.

4.                   Specify how the corpus is comprised. It is mentioned that 200 declarative phrases were analyzed, but it is not clear if they are from the corpus at large, from each speaker, or from each variety.

Results:

1.          Use a drawing script in Praat for figures; the screenshot is not ideal.

2.          Harmonize the way you segment. Figure 2 and Figure 5 use point tier to mark pitch accents, while the other figures use interval tier.

3.          The syllabic segmentation in the word tenía in Figure 1 should be te-ní-a since it is a hiatus.

4.          Figure 2 and Figure 5 are the same — it would be more convenient to have different examples to make the data visible.

5.          The description in Figure 2 says: Y siempre me llama al teléfono, while the figure says: Encontré una imagen — they do not match.

6.          The example in Figure 3 is an enumerative sentence. This type of sentence should be considered separately, since they have a very particular intonation in the prenuclear section because they are brief pauses within the sentence, a characteristic of enumeration. Thus, they should not be part of the corpus. At the very least, they should be studied independently. Also, their inclusion should be mentioned in the methodology.

7.          For the figures, I recommend using standard Praat values in the spectrogram playback.

8.          The position of the pitch accents that appear in the prenucleus of the analyzed sentences must be specified, i.e., what accent appears at the beginning, in the middle, etc.

9.          A table with the intermediate junctures and their percentage of occurrence should be included for each Puerto Rican variety.

10.      It is mentioned that the H* tone is used very frequently in Loíza's speech. However, this statement is not supported by the information provided in Tables 6 and 7. I suggest reviewing this statement.

11.      There is a lack of consistency between the total data analyzed, which was specified in the methodology (200), and the data provided in Table 6 (n=598), since only one nuclear accent can be placed per sentence.

12.      In line 392 it says “So_ToBI”, which I reckon should be “Sp-ToBI”.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The prosodic analysis is well-structured and well-documented, and is worthy of publication in Languages. At the same time, the attempt to link these intonational patterns to earlier time periods when Africans acquired Spanish as L2 is purely speculative (presumed authors’ other works notwithstanding), and should be qualified as such.

There are some prosodic similarities among rural Afro-Hispanic varieties in several locations (e.g. Lipski, 2014), but this is only suggestive, and by no means points to any sort of shared African connection. In fact early peak alignment and similar enhanced prominence may well reflect L2 acquisition generations ago, but without specific L1s in play. Moreover, the same traits are found in the vernacular Spanish of speakers of several Native American languages (to wit the studies cited by the author(s)), and it is known that during colonial times, many enslaved Africans had more contact with indigenous individuals than with L1 Spanish speakers. Lacking here is comparison with surrounding Spanish varieties with no known Afro-colonial ingredients.

All African languages presumed to have interacted with Spanish and other colonial European languages are lexical tone languages, also characterized by phenomena such as downstep and downdrift. While it is likely that Spanish nuclear pitch accents were interpreted as High tones (as found in borrowings from European languages into African tone languages), little is known about how utterance-length intonational patterns were treated (Lipski 2016 provides some contemporary data from the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea, whose prosodic patterns are radically different from any Latin American variety—including those presumed to be congenors of earlier Afro-Hispanic contacts). At the same time, there is no reliable information on specific African languages that may have impinged on colonial Spanish (only Palenquero has been associated with some key Kikongo lexical items, but as Schwegler and Hualde show, Palenquero and Palenque Spanish do not transparently reflect Kikongo or other African intonational patterns, and Parkvall and Jacobs even question the predominance of Kikongo in colonial Palenque). Therefore, prosodic commonalities among Spanish varieties with some African impact in earlier times do not directly address the nature of earlier Afro-Hispanic contact varieties.

There are some inconsistencies in the final paragraph. First the notion that Loiza Spanish has a “simplified inventory” needs empirical justification. Compared to what? Can the author(s) affirm that the full range of LS intonational patterns were elicited? If enslaved Africans in PR had “relatively good access to Spanish” (a highly debatable assertion), then how to explain the many colonial references to bozales and their limited language proficiency? And if enslaved Africans achieved “an advanced mastery of Spanish,” then there should have been no “contact variety” to be passed on to subsequent generations, only “masterfully advanced” Spanish. Taken together, these highly speculative asides detract from the solid empirical analysis of the LS data, and make no solid contribution to the reconstruction of Afro-Hispanic linguistic history. I recommend that the entire Afro-Hispanic sections be reduced to a brief mention.

Lipski, J. (2014). The many facets of Spanish dialect diversification in Latin America. Iberian imperialism and language evolution in Latin America, ed. S. Mufwene, 38-75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lipski, J. (2016). “Toned-up” Spanish: stress → pitch → tone(?) in Equatorial Guinea. Romance Linguistics 2013 Selected papers from the 43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages ed.  C. Tortora, M. den Dikken, I. L. Montoya & T. O'Neill, 233-255. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Parkvall, M., & Jacobs, B. (2020). Palenquero origins: A tale of more than two languages. Diachronica, 37(4), 540-576

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf