Resumen de Exploring extended focus and meaning in Chilean Spanish intonational plateau contours
Brandon M. A. Rogers, Rajiv Rao, Matthew Burner
The current study delves further into the Chilean declarative intonational plateau patterns first documented in Rogers (2013) (i.e., rise, extended plateau, fall). Using a significantly larger amount of spontaneous data coming from 40 speakers of Chilean Spanish, and motivated by previous work on narrow focus on individual words in Spanish, we propose that Chilean Spanish plateaus are a form of extended focus whereby speakers emphasize entire ideas, extending prosodic prominence to a variety of content. In order to phonologically account for this pattern, and inspired by the observed rapid speech rate at which plateaus are realized, we propose that compression of typical F0 excursions associated with L and H targets results in phonetic undershoot of the L, thus yielding the surface form of a series of Hs, or a plateau (inspired by Cho & Flemming, 2015). To justify why speakers produce extended focus in this way, we refer to Gussenhoven’s (2002) Effort Code and suggest that raised F0 plateaus are the most economical way of highlighting strings of words that form thoughts.
