Four levels of tonal scaling at the boundaries of Peninsular Spanish sentences

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to provide evidence of the existence of four contrastive tonal levels in sentence final position (boundary tones) in Peninsular Spanish. Recent studies on Spanish intonation within the Sp_ToBI annotation system have incorporated two additional tones (a mid tone, M% and an extra high tone, HH%) to the original boundary tone inventory proposed in former investigations within the auto segmental-metrical framework (a low tone, L% and a high tone, H%). This study presents the results of a production test which confirms the existence of the aforementioned four tonal categories by means of an acoustic analysis of four kinds of sentences which are identical as far as segmental structure and nuclear pitch accent are concerned but which contrast due to the different scaling of the boundary tones. Overall, 240 sentences were analyzed for Central Peninsular Spanish. The results show the association of each tone level to a different meaning of the sentence: L% (declarative), M% (unfinished enumeration), H% (calling contour) and HH% (reiterative question).