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Introduction
My current research interests are the interface between (morpho)syntax and prosody, prosodic realization of information structure, intonation and tone in general, and language contact. By training, I am a theoretical/formal linguist, but I carry out my research in the framework of laboratory phonology (i.e., I record speakers and analyze the data quantitatively and run statistical analyses to test phonological hypotheses). I am currently working on several projects, but the main two are the syntax-prosody interface in Basque and the influence of Basque intonation onto Spanish in the Basque Country.
Publications
Publications (52)
This paper presents new proposals for the reconstruction of Proto-Basque accentuation, as well as the development and chronology of the main accentual systems of the modern dialects, grounded in phonetic, historical and typological evidence. It is the first attempt to reconstruct Basque accentuation from a pre-Roman stage to the dialectalization th...
This volume brings together novel, original studies on prosody and prosodic interfaces. It consists of fifteen chapters, of which some look at word prosody and phrase prosody in individual languages, some examine the interactions between lexical tones and intonation, and others analyze the syntax-prosody interface. Despite much recent attention pai...
The prosodic systems of Basque, Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish have recently yielded a
great deal of detailed work that has contributed to comprehensive descriptions of the different languages and language varieties. Taking a comparative stance, as in Frota and Prieto (2015b) for three Romance languages and Elordieta and Hualde (2014) for Basque,...
En este trabajo describimos los tonemas más frecuentes en enunciados declarativos y en enunciados interrogativos absolutos y parciales de la fala, lengua galaico-portuguesa hablada en la Sierra de Gata (Cáceres, Extremadura). La fala está compuesta por tres variedades: valverdeiru, lagarteiru y mañegu. Se ha grabado a 12 hablantes en habla conversa...
The present study analyzes the prosodic characteristics of the variety of Spanish in contact with Basque (in the Basque Country, Spain). We focus on information-seeking yes/no questions, which present different intonation contours in Spanish and Basque. In Castilian Spanish, these sentences end in a rising contour, whereas in Basque, they end in a...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions
The main goal of this paper is to analyse how social factors determine the degree of occurrence of intonational features of Basque in Spanish in the Basque Country (i.e. Basque Spanish).
Design/methodology/approach
We concentrate on information-seeking yes/no questions. In Castilian Spanish, these end...
In two artificial language learning experiments with four groups of highly proficient Basque-Spanish bilinguals and two groups of Spanish monolinguals, we examine the cues that allow adult listeners to parse new input into phrases. In addition, we investigate which factors lead bilinguals to switch between the segmentation strategies characteristic...
Lan honetan Arabako herri izenek gazteleraz erakusten duten azentuera aztertzen da. Badira izen asko azentua hitzaren hasieratik gertuago dutenak hitz bukaeratik baino (adibidez Gardélegi, Etxábarri, Arrízala, Olábezar, Róitegi, Gújuli, eta abar). Beste izen askok, ordea, azentua azkenaurreko silaban dute: Aretxabaléta, Egiléta, Maturána, Urtupíña,...
This study investigates the convergent accommodating behaviour of Andalusian speakers (Southern Spain) relocated in Asturias (Northern Spain), a context of dialect contact, in terms of intonation. We aim to address three research questions: (1) is there evidence for accommodation? (2) Do social factors determine accommodation? And (3) does salience...
A Fala is the name of an Ibero-Romance language of the Galician-Portuguese branch located in Sierra de Gata (Cáceres, Extremadura). It has three dialects: Valverdeiru, Lagarteiru and Mañegu. There are not many descriptive studies of the language. Our goal is to determine the intonation of A Fala and its varieties, specifically the most frequent nuc...
The present production study investigates the prosodic phrasing characteristic of sentences containing a relative clause with two possible noun phrase antecedents [Noun Phrase 1 Noun Phrase 2 Relative Clause] in the variety of Spanish spoken in the Basque Country. It aims to establish the default prosodic phrasing of these structures, as well as wh...
This paper presents data that force a revised account of the distribution of downstep and pitch reset in Lekeitio Basque. In the light of these data, previous analyses of pitch reset in Lekeitio Basque make wrong predictions. On the one hand, pitch reset is predicted where downstep occurs, and on the other, an ordinary reset is predicted where a la...
The present investigation seeks to determine whether and under what circumstances can adult bilinguals deploy segmentation strategies characteristic of their two languages, or of their dominant language. To that end, we inquired whether the context language employed during the segmentation experiment (i.e., the language in which participants receiv...
Euskal fonetika eta fonologiaren arloan kokatzen da Bizkaiko iparraldeko pitch-accent sistemaren gaineko ikerketa hau, prosodia eta sintaxia hartzen ditu aintzat eta hitz azentugabeez osatutako osagai prosodikoen eraketan Bizkaiko iparraldeko mendebaldeko azpisistemakoak diren Aulestiko eta Lekeitioko hizkerek testuinguru horretan berdin jokatzen d...
Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure (1997)
This second volume contains detailed surveys of the intonational phonology of fourteen typologically diverse languages, described in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Unlike the first volume, half of the languages, which vary in their word prosody as well as their geographic distribution, are understudied languages or researched through fieldwo...
In this article we study a language contact situation in Majorca, Spain, in which adult monolingual speakers of Spanish who arrived recently in Majorca acquire aspects of Majorcan Catalan prosody. Although the possibility that the adoption of features can take place directly from Catalan is not rejected, we provide evidence that it can be an indire...
El movimiento de constituyentes explora uno de los fenómenos más característicos de las lenguas naturales: la posibilidad de que algunos elementos de la oración se interpreten simultáneamente en distintas posiciones sintácticas, pese a que su realización fonética solo está asociada a una de ellas. Para dar cuenta de este fenómeno, la gramática gene...
As the title indicates, Prosodic Categories: Production, Perception and Comprehension addresses the central question of the role played by prosody in language grammar and language processing. The eleven chapters of this book were developed from presentations to the Third Tone and Intonation in Europe Conference (TIE3), hosted by the Universidade de...
As the title indicates, Prosodic Categories: Production, Perception and Comprehension addresses the central question of the role played by prosody in language grammar and language processing. The eleven chapters of this book were developed from presentations to the Third Tone and Intonation in Europe Conference (TIE3), hosted by the Universidade de...
In this paper we analyze the intonational properties of a type of focus construction that has been understudied, represented by answers to wh-questions in which the constituent that fills the variable does not do so exhaustively, that is, it does not provide an exhaustive answer because the speaker cannot commit to asserting that the other potentia...
This paper reviews some well-known facts from TJ and NBB which show that prosodic markedness constraints have a role to play in determining the phonological domain structure for the tonal and intonational phenomena of sentences in these languages. Facts like these are highly relevant to ongoing debates about the nature of the syntax-phonology inter...
In this paper we analyze the intonational properties of a type of focus construction that has not been discussed in the literature on focus in generative grammar. We refer to a type of answers to wh-questions in which the constituent that fills the variable does not do so exhaustively, that is, it does not provide an exhaustive answer because the s...
This paper analyzes patterns of prosodic prominence and intonational phrasing of narrowly focused words in a variety of Northern Bizkaian Basque. One type of speaker can only single out words intonationally if they are accented and constitute APs by themselves, while the other type can have prominence on any word which is accented, regardless of wh...
In Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB), Intermediate Phrases (ips) align by default with the left edge of syntactic phrases. The main intonational cue of ips is partial pitch reset at their left edges. A minimal size constraint applies on ips occurring at the left edge of an Intonational Phrase (IP), requiring that they consist of at least two Accentual...
This article provides a critical review of the phonological theories that deal with segmental phenomena. It also presents data and arguments that constitute a challenge to these theories and posit the need for considering another way of creating phonological domains from syntactic structure. The article specifically offers an overview of the most r...
Previous work on intonational phrasing in Romance has addressed the role of syntactic and prosodic structure on the placement of boundaries within SVO utterances (Elordieta et al. 2003, D'Imperio et al. to appear). A comparable database of 744 utterances was created for the 5 languages and varieties under study: Catalan (Cat), European Portuguese (...
Across languages, in narrow contrastive focus constructions one or more cues (morphological, syntactic, intonational) are
used by speakers in order to express the intended meaning correctly, singling out the focalized element or constituent from
the rest of the elements in the sentence. However, in this article I will provide evidence that in the p...
In this study, the scaling of utterance-initial f0 values and H initial peaks are examined in several Romance languages as a function of phrasal length, measured in number of pitch accents (1 to 3 pitch accents) and in number of syllables (3 to 15). The motivation for this study stems from contradictory claims in the literature regarding whether th...
This article investigates the role of prosodic length and syntactic complexity on intonational phrasing in Spanish and European Portuguese. Spanish presents a clear tendency to divide utterances into (S)(VO) phrasings, depending on branchingness. In EP (SVO) is the predominant phrasing, but a long branching subject can trigger the phrasing (S)(VO)....
This work investigates the role of syntactic branchingness and constituent length in determining phrasing within a corpus of read utterances. Specifically, a corpus of four Romance languages, i.e., Catalan, European Portuguese (both Northern European Portuguese, NEP, and Standard European Portuguese, SEP), Italian and Spanish, was collected in whic...
This paper presents patterns of accentual alignment in two varieties of Spanish spoken in the Basque Country: Lekeitio Spanish (LS), with speakers whose other native language is Lekeitio Basque (LB); and Vitoria Spanish (VS), with monolingual speakers of Spanish from the city of Vitoria. These patterns are compared to those of Madrid Spanish (MS),...
This work investigates the role of syntactic branchingness and constituent length in determining phrasing within a corpus of read utterances. Specifically , a corpus of four Romance languages, i.e., Catalan, European Portu-guese (both Northern European Portuguese, NEP, and Standard European Portuguese, SEP), Italian and Spanish, was collected in wh...
In this paper we examine the realization of accentual prominence in downstep contexts (i.e. after another accented word) in the Northern Bizkaian Basque dialect of Lekeitio. Previous work has suggested that pitch is the primary correlate of accent in this language. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that in contexts where pitch differences are l...
In this paper the main aspects of the intonation of broad focus declaratives in Lekeitio Spanish are described and analyzed. In this variety, accents are realized as pitch rises rather than falls, similarly to Standard Peninsular Spanish and unlike in Lekeitio Basque, the other native language of these speakers. Accentual valleys are aligned before...
In the central and western Basque-speaking regions there are two main accentual types: In the Northern Bizkaian area we find a pitch-accent system with demarcative phrase-initial rises and uniformly falling (H*L) accents, on the last syllable of the phrase in the unmarked case. In the rest of the area the general rule is postinitial accent. This st...
This study investigates the influence of syntactic branching and constituent length on prosodic boundary placement in three Iberian languages: Catalan, European Portuguese, and Spanish. The most common phrasing in Catalan is (S)(VO). However, in cases of long branching objects or double-branching objects with non-branching subjects, (SV)(O) phrasin...
This study investigates the influence of syntactic branching and constituent length on prosodic boundary placement in three Iberian languages: Catalan, European Portuguese, and Spanish. The most common phrasing in Catalan is (S)(VO). However, in cases of long branching objects or double-branching objects with non-branching subjects, (SV)(O) phrasin...
In this paper the basic features of the intonational structure of Bermeo Basque (BB) are analyzed. In BB there exists a lexical distinction between accented and unaccented words. Accented words are always stressed, and unaccented words (not containing any accented morphemes) only receive stress on their final syllable when they are immediately prec...
It is widely accepted in the literature that Discourse Functional Units (a.k.a. discourse markers, connectors, pragmatic particles) often show prosodic properties of separate intonation units and are also phonologically reduced. In this paper we investigate these hypotheses in the use of entonces 'then' in spoken Castilian Spanish. Acoustic measure...
In this paper the basic features of the intonational structure of Bermeo Basque (BB) are analyzed. In BB there exists a lexical distinction between accented and unaccented words. Accented words are always stressed, and unaccented words (not containing any accented morphemes) only receive stress on their final syllable when they are immediately prec...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Southern California, 1997. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 289-308).
Projects
Projects (3)
This project aims to study the prosodic and segmental accommodation of emigrated Extremadurans (west of Spain) in the Basque Country and the social factors regulating that process such as linguistic attitudes.
