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Search Results (4)

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Keywords = declarative and interrogative sentences

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17 pages, 4067 KB  
Article
Effects of Syntactic Structures on Intonational Pitch Movement in Mandarin Chinese
by Ling Zhang
Languages 2026, 11(6), 119; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages11060119 - 11 Jun 2026
Viewed by 338
Abstract
Previous research on Mandarin Chinese tones and intonation has focused primarily on universal sentence pitch patterns (declination) and sentence types (declarative and interrogative). The specific impact of internal syntactic structures remains under-explored. This study presents two acoustic experiments using controlled Tone 1 (high-level) [...] Read more.
Previous research on Mandarin Chinese tones and intonation has focused primarily on universal sentence pitch patterns (declination) and sentence types (declarative and interrogative). The specific impact of internal syntactic structures remains under-explored. This study presents two acoustic experiments using controlled Tone 1 (high-level) stimuli to isolate intonational “big waves” from lexical “small ripples”. Experiment 1 investigates how syntactic position (subject vs. object), relative clause type (subject-relative vs. object-relative), and word class (verb vs. noun) influence pitch contours. Experiment 2 resolves conflicting findings regarding word-class pitch by testing nouns and verbs across four sentential contexts. The results indicate that subject positions carry significantly higher pitch than object positions, reflecting an interaction between SVO word order and declination. Crucially, subject-relative (SR) clauses exhibit a falling pitch tendency, while object-relative (OR) clauses show a rising trend. These results suggest that pitch realization is a complex “algebraic sum” of universal phonological trends, syntactic hierarchy, and semantic information structure. Full article
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48 pages, 18328 KB  
Article
Basic Intonation Patterns of Galician Spanish
by Susana Pérez Castillejo and Mónica de la Fuente Iglesias
Languages 2024, 9(2), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9020057 - 6 Feb 2024
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4734
Abstract
This paper presents an inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones in Galician Spanish (GS), a variety spoken in Northwestern Spain. Research so far has focused on explaining GS intonation features as transfer phenomena from Galician, the vernacular Romance language in the region. [...] Read more.
This paper presents an inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones in Galician Spanish (GS), a variety spoken in Northwestern Spain. Research so far has focused on explaining GS intonation features as transfer phenomena from Galician, the vernacular Romance language in the region. Because of this, previous studies have often included Galician L1 speakers, for whom transfer is expected when speaking Spanish L2. However, GS is the single L1 of half the children in Galicia, and it is spoken almost exclusively by about a quarter of Galicians. Our study focuses on this population and investigates the relative frequency and distribution of tonal units in GS when direct transfer from Galician is unlikely. A corpus of 1706 sentences (statements, questions, imperatives, and vocatives in neutral and biased contexts) was obtained from 28 participants through a discourse completion task. Results showed that patterns previously attributed to direct transfer from Galician L1 (for example, upstepped final accents in neutral declaratives or falling contours in unmarked interrogatives) are widespread in GS as L1. Findings also show commonalities with other L1 Spanish varieties, both in Europe (for example, L* L% as the unmarked declarative ending) and America (for example, the L* + H prenuclear accent of Caribbean varieties). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Prosody in Shared Linguistic Spaces of the Spanish-Speaking World)
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23 pages, 1820 KB  
Article
Inferential Interrogatives with qué in Spanish
by Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández and Mercedes Tubino-Blanco
Languages 2023, 8(4), 282; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8040282 - 30 Nov 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3379
Abstract
In this paper, we discuss the evidential properties of inferential interrogative sentences with qué in Spanish. This interrogative type exhibits the shape of a wh-question but the interpretation of a polar question. These sentences have the additional particularity that they are interrogatives [...] Read more.
In this paper, we discuss the evidential properties of inferential interrogative sentences with qué in Spanish. This interrogative type exhibits the shape of a wh-question but the interpretation of a polar question. These sentences have the additional particularity that they are interrogatives with evidential material, which are attested but not frequent crosslinguistically, if compared with declarative evidentials. An interesting consequence of their double interrogative and evidential nature is the fact that both discourse participants have a prominent role in the interpretation of these sentences, as the Speaker makes the inference but the Addressee is requested for confirmation. To account for the construction, we assume a multiple-layered system that includes both Speech Act projection and Finiteness projection. In these two areas we simultaneously find evidential material housing the Speaker’s inference, and a raised Addressee in its prominent interrogative position as the participant with the knowledge to provide the requested confirmation of the interrogative’s truth value. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Syntax and Discourse at the Crossroads)
17 pages, 5810 KB  
Article
Tonal Proximity Relationship in the Spanish of the Canary Islands in the Light of Dialectometry
by Josefa Dorta and María José González Rodríguez
Languages 2019, 4(2), 29; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4020029 - 27 May 2019
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4652
Abstract
Traditional linguistic geography has not dealt with issues relating to the prosodic study of languages and linguistic varieties. The international project AMPER (Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman) achieves a key milestone in this area by studying the prosody of Romance [...] Read more.
Traditional linguistic geography has not dealt with issues relating to the prosodic study of languages and linguistic varieties. The international project AMPER (Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman) achieves a key milestone in this area by studying the prosody of Romance languages and varieties in order to disseminate research outcomes in the form of interactive online atlases. Using prosodic data from a wide corpus of declarative and interrogative sentences, obtained from a range of informants from the seven Canary Islands (AMPERCan), a dialectometric study was carried out with a tool especially designed within the framework of AMPER. Correlation values, dendrograms as well as multivariate analysis by means of the multidimensional scaling technique (MDS), have enabled us to establish relationships of close prosodic proximity among the Canary Islands. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Perspectives in Geolinguistics and Dialectology)
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