Effect of interrogative words in sentence-final inflections of utterances from an oral corpus of Mapudungun: exploratory study

Abstract

This exploratory study provides quantitative evidence regarding the effect of interrogative words in sentence-final inflections of the last two syllables of interrogative utterances from Mapudungun. The sample contains 81 interrogative utterances spoken by three native speakers of Mapudungun, representing three different geographical areas from the Araucanía region: Lonquimay, Cholchol and Padre las Casas. Results showed that most interrogative utterances display a sentence-final rise in fundamental frequency; also, there is a clear trend to find larger rises in utterances that do not have interrogative words. These differences were statistically significant in Lonquimay, but not in Cholchol or Padre las Casas. These results, which are discussed in relation to dynamics of linguistic contact and pragmatic resources to convey information about interrogative clauses, suggest that descending interrogative utterances from Chilean Spanish might be influencing those variants of Mapudungun in which there is more linguistic contact with Spanish, and that relatively large sentence-final rises are the primary vernacular mechanism to convey interrogative pragmatic information in Mapudungun, except when interrogative words codify this information via a narrow focus