Rajiv Rao* and Sandro Sessarego The intonation of Chota ...

Rajiv Rao* and Sandro Sessarego

The intonation of Chota Valley Spanish:Contact-induced phenomenaat the discourse-phonology interface

https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2018-0006

Abstract: This study offers a prosodic analysis of broad focus declarative sen-tences in Chota Valley Spanish (CVS), an Afro-Hispanic dialect of Ecuador.Findings indicate that its phonological inventory of pitch accents and phraseboundary tones appears to be significantly simplified in comparison to what hasbeen reported for other native, non-contact varieties of Spanish. In particular,we observe a strong tendency in CVS toward duplicating nuclear and prenuclearpitch accents, as well as phrase boundary tones. We analyze these results interms of contact-induced phenomena related to a process of first languageacquisition of advanced second language acquisition strategies, which appearto be hampered by processability constraints applying at the discourse-phonol-ogy interface. The study’s implications are discussed with respect to the debateconcerning the origins of this dialect and several other Afro-Hispanic Languagesof the Americas.

Keywords: Chota Valley Spanish, intonation, pitch accent, phrase boundary,discourse-phonology interface

1 Introduction

The intonation of the Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs) is arelatively understudied phenomenon. While investigators have begun to applyintonational phonological theory to these languages in recent years (cf. Correa2012; Lipski 2007; Rao and Sessarego 2016; Sessarego and Rao 2016), one varietywhose intonational phonology has not been discussed is Chota Valley Spanish(CVS), which is spoken in the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi, Ecuador by the

*Corresponding author: Rajiv Rao, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA,E-mail: [email protected] Sessarego, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA; Freiburg Institutefor Advanced Studies, Freiburg, Germany; Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Helsinki,Finland; Foro Latinoamericano de Antropología del Derecho, Mexico, Mexico,E-mail: [email protected]

Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 2018; 11(1): 163–192

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descendants of black captives taken to this Andean region in colonial times towork on local Jesuit haciendas (Sessarego 2013b). This study aims to movetoward filling this gap by examining CVS broad focus declarative intonation.

The vernacular in question shares a number of morphosyntactic featureswith several AHLAs (e.g., variable gender and number agreement across thedeterminer phrase, overuse of overt subject pronouns, variable subject-verbagreement; cf. Sessarego 2013a, 2013b for a full account of such grammaticalphenomena). For this reason, it has been suggested that CVS (Schwegler 1999,2014), along with other AHLAs (Granda 1968, 1970; Otheguy 1973; Perl andSchwegler 1998), may be seen as the result of a (de)creolization process consist-ing of the progressive approximation of these stigmatized black vernaculars tomore prestigious regional varieties of Spanish. This process would have begunimmediately after the Land Reform, which freed Afro-Ecuadorians from forcedpeonage in 1964. According to this view, the aforementioned morphosyntacticfeatures would be the remaining traces of a previous creole stage.

The (de)creolization hypothesis has been opposed on several occasions withrespect to a number of Afro-Hispanic dialects (Díaz-Campos and Clements 2005;Díaz-Campos and Clements 2008; Lipski 1986, 1993; Sessarego 2013b, 2013c, 2014a,2014b, 2015). In particular, contrary to what has been assumed in previous studieson CVS (McWhorter 2000; Schwegler 1999), in recent years, it has been suggestedthat colonial Chota Valley did not present the socio-demographic conditions thatwould have favored creole formation. Indeed, a closer historical investigationreveals that massive African-born slave importations never happened in this region(Coronel Feijóo 1991). Conversely, whenever possible, planters relied on a cheaperIndian workforce, and when blacks were used, they consisted for the most part ofcriollo (i.e., slaves born in the Americas) captives who could speak Spanish. Inaddition, a concomitance of social, religious and economic factors appears to havefavored Spanish language acquisition in these Jesuit plantations, thus indirectlyreducing the probability of creole development (Bouisson 1997; Lucena Salmoral1994). For these reasons, it has been proposed that the non-standardmorphosyntactic features found in CVS may be better described as the result ofconventionalized advanced second language acquisition (SLA) strategies ratherthan traces of a previous creole stage (Sessarego 2013a, 2013b, 2014a).1 Accordingto this SLA-based perspective, the aforementioned phenomena, which havetraditionally been classified as “creole-like features” for CVS (and for otherAHLAs), can actually be conceived as the byproduct of processability constraints,which apply to constructions requiring a high processing demand on the

1 Cf. also Velupillai (2015: 139ff) for on overview of relevant approaches to the presence offossilized second language (L2) features in a number of contact varieties.

164 Rajiv Rao and Sandro Sessarego



grammatical interfaces between different languagemodules (e.g., syntax/discourseinterface, syntax/morphology interface, etc.) (Sessarego in press).

In this article, rather than focusing on the sociohistorical and morphosyntacticevidence that has been adduced against the (de)creolization hypothesis for CVS andother AHLAs, we analyze an aspect of Afro-Hispanic grammars that has beensparsely studied in relation to the debate on the genesis and evolution of thesecontact varieties: the configuration of their intonational inventory. In particular, weemploy the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology (Ladd2008; Pierrehumbert 1980) to analyze the inventory of pitch accents and phraseboundaries in broad focus declarative sentences extracted from a corpus ofsociolinguistic interviews carried out with a group of elderly Afro-Choteños. Ourmain finding shows that the intonational phonology of CVS appears to be reducedin comparison to what has been found for other native varieties of Spanish,including that of Quito (O’Rourke 2010). We attribute our observations to contact-induced issues tied to the first language (L1) acquisition of advanced L2 strategies,which seem to be inhibited by processability constraints at the interface betweendiscourse and (intonational) phonology. Thus, in CVS intonation, we observe tracesof the same SLA strategies that we hold responsible for having shaped CVS mor-phosyntax. Finally, we discuss the overarching implications of the simplified CVSintonational inventory with respect to the highly debated topic of the origin ofAHLAs, in general, and CVS, in particular (Lipski 2005; Schwegler 1999; Sessarego2013a). In order to do so, we compare our CVS data with recent results obtained byanalyzing the prosodic inventory of Yungueño Spanish (YS), an Afro-Hispanicdialect from Bolivia (Rao and Sessarego 2016; Sessarego and Rao 2016).

2 Background

2.1 Intonational phonology

The AM framework provides the foundation of intonational theory in the currentpaper; however, the Spanish in the Tones and Break Indices (Sp_ToBI) model isimplemented as well (Beckman et al. 2002; Estebas-Vilaplana and Prieto 2008;Face and Prieto 2007). In AM theory, high (i.e., H) and low (i.e., L) tones are themost common and are linked to fundamental frequency (i.e., F0) peaks andvalleys, respectively, at the phonetic level. Each of these tones can form mono-tonal or bitonal pitch accents, which are phonological targets associated withlexically stressed syllables. F0 movements are associated with phonologicaltargets in levels above the syllable in the prosodic hierarchy illustrated in (1).

The intonation of Chota Valley Spanish 165



(1) Prosodic hierarchyIP Intonational Phraseip Intermediate PhrasePW Prosodic WordF Footσ Syllable

The IP, ip and PW are the constituents most central to the topics of this paper,and as such, we will focus on their features in this section. The IP is non-isomorphic with syntactic structure and typically bears meaning (Rao 2009).Its boundaries contain audible pauses at left and right boundaries ( > 400 milli-seconds (ms) at the right boundary according to Rao 2010). Along with audiblepauses, other researchers of Spanish intonation have found that reduced F0levels and lengthening effects also cue IP boundaries (Rao 2009, 2010). The AMtranscriptional convention corresponding with an IP boundary is % (e.g., L%=low IP boundary tone).

The ip is a smaller phrasal unit housed within an IP and does notdepend on carrying meaning. Its importance became clear in studies thatshowed its use in perceptually disambiguating identical chains of wordswith different syntactic structures (Nibert 1999, 2000). The ip boundaries ofSpanish are acoustically cued through F0 rises to the end of a word, an F0rise followed by a plateau, final lengthening, reset of F0 level, and brief andless clear speech disjunctures (Elordieta et al. 2003; Rao 2009, 2010). Thenotation used to indicate an ip boundary tone is – (e.g., H- = high ip bound-ary tone).

The PW is a concept associated with units that bear stressed, perceptuallysalient syllables. It helps explain the non-isomorphic relationship betweenmorphology and phonology; for instance, compounds can be considered oneunit but each of its members can individually accept the application of pho-nological rules (Peperkamp 1999). In Spanish, PWs are mainly content words(e.g., adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs) rather than function or grammaticalwords (e.g., clitics, prepositions) (Hualde 2002; Quilis 1993). Lexical itemsclassified as PWs manifest acoustic correlates of stress such as F0 excursions(i.e., accent) and/or increases in duration and/or intensity (Ortega-Llebariaand Prieto 2010). Since PWs are tied to words with stressed syllables, theygenerally have pitch accents; however, due to variables such as word length,repetition in discourse, word frequency and grammatical category, theseexpected pitch accents may be absent, meaning words can be deaccented(Rao 2009).




2.2 Spanish declarative intonation

Patterns of F0 movement in Spanish’s seven most frequent pitch accents are illu-strated in Figure 1. The diagram of each pitch accent is divided into thirds, with thefirst third corresponding with the pre-tonic syllable, the middle third with thestressed syllable and the final third with the post-tonic syllable. In terms of nota-tional conventions, > points out peak displacement to the post-tonic syllable and *makes reference to the target phonologically associated with a stressed syllable.Furthermore, a significant increase in the F0 level signaling an H or an L tone whencompared to the previous H or Lwithin a given ip is deemed upstep, which ismarkedusing ¡. Similarly, a decrease in H or L compared to its preceding H or L within thesame ip is called downstep, a trend transcribed using !. With respect to nuclearposition, where a phrase boundary is relevant, in cases in which H* concludes apitch accent, evidence of an H- tone would appear in the final third of the diagramsin Figure 1 as an F0 plateau or the continued ascent of F0. If a nuclear pitch accentwere to end in L*, we would expect the final third of each diagram to exhibit asustained low or a further decrease in F0 level, both of which suggest an L- or L%boundary tone. A third ip boundary tone possibility is the mid variety, M-, whichliterally occurs at an F0 level between the relative high of H- and the relative low ofL- (Aguilar et al. 2009; Beckman et al. 2002; Estebas-Vilaplana and Prieto 2008; Faceand Prieto 2007; Hualde and Prieto 2015, 2016; Prieto and Roseano 2010).2

Prenuclear broad focus pitch accents in most varieties of Spanish areusually of the type L + >H*; that is, F0 movement in words not occurring directlybefore a phrase boundary begins with a valley anchored to the stressed syllableonset and a subsequent rise that does not reach its peak until a post-tonicsyllable. A second prenuclear pattern is where F0 stays relatively low for theduration of the stressed syllable before beginning to rise at the end of thissyllable, reaching a peak in a post-tonic syllable. This sequence of F0 move-ments corresponds with the L* +H pitch accent. It should be noted that the peakdisplacement to a post-tonic syllable observed in L + >H* and L* +H does nottake place in cases of adjacent stresses (e.g., café negro ‘black coffee’) becausethe realization of the pitch accent associated with the second stressed syllableimpedes displacement of the peak associated with the first one. In such cases,one common outcome is F0 peaking within the confines of the first stressedsyllable, or an L +H* pitch accent, which is followed by a sustained F0 plateau

2 We selected the particular pitch accent inventory detailed in this section for the purpose ofcomparability with other recent work on Afro-Hispanic intonation (Rao and Sessarego 2016;Sessarego and Rao 2016). We encourage researchers to consider the more recent theoreticalproposals by Hualde and Prieto (2015, 2016) when conducting similar analyses in the future.




through the second stressed syllable, or an H* monotonal pitch accent. Anotherpossibility in stress clash cases is that one of the words is deaccented. Weshould mention that the alignment trends just cited may be influenced byopen versus closed syllable structure, with the latter exhibiting increase peakretraction with respect to the stressed syllable offset (Prieto and Torreira 2007).Another factor of note is that words with oxytonic stress have been observed tofavor alignment within the stressed syllable regardless of phrase position(Hualde 2002; Llisterri et al. 1995). For a detailed description and history of thephonological representations just outlined, see Beckman et al. (2002), Estebas-Vilaplana and Prieto (2008), Face and Prieto (2007), Hualde (2002), Hualde andPrieto (2015, 2016), Prieto and Roseano (2010), and Sosa (1999).

Spanish (and Romance in general) obeys the Nuclear Stress Rule (Chomskyand Halle 1968), meaning relative metrical prominence falls on the rightmostportion of prosodic domains in (1).3 For example, pitch accents bound to wordsin nuclear position of a phrase are deemed heads of the phrases within whichthey are contained. At both the IP and ip levels, distinct acoustic measuressignal nuclear salience. Terminal salience in IPs of the declaratives of mostvarieties of Spanish is frequently cued through lengthening effects, as opposedto F0, which undergoes substantial reduction, or final lowering. This low level of

Figure 1: Pitch accents in Spanish (recreated based on Aguilar et al. 2009).

3 It should be noted that a series of relatively recent investigations dealing with focus and wordorder variation in a variety of dialects of Spanish have found that prominence marking is not assimple as the Nuclear Stress Rule makes it seem (cf. Feldhausen and Vanrell 2014; Gabriel 2010;Heidinger 2013, 2015; Hoot 2012, 2016; Muntendam 2013; Uth 2014; Vanrell and FernándezSoriano 2013).




F0 still corresponds with a pitch accent, L*, but only because it occurs in themost prominent phrasal position; if a similar relative F0 low were to be mani-fested in prenuclear position, it would be considered a case of deaccenting.4 InIP-final position, L* is usually followed by an L% boundary, meaning L*L% is acommon nuclear configuration (i.e., nuclear pitch accent + boundary tone) inSpanish broad focus declaratives. Unlike prenuclear conditions, IP nuclear F0peaks, when present, are typically located in the stressed syllable because aphrase boundary blocks their rightward displacement. Phonologically, thistranslates to a nuclear L +H* pitch accent, after which an L% IP boundary isfrequent. This nuclear configuration, L +H*L%, is termed circumflex (i.e., rise-fall) and occurs in declaratives with various emphatic pragmatic functions in atleast Caribbean and Mexican varieties of Spanish (Butragueño 2004; Prieto andRoseano 2010; Sosa 1999). On a related note, it is important to stress thatanalyzing nuclear configurations, rather than treating nuclear pitch accentsand boundary tones separately, is a worthwhile approach to both phrasal levelsof Spanish intonation because the combined activity of the two targets is crucialto recognizing pragmatic distinctions between utterances (Prieto and Roseano2010).

Concerning nuclear position of the ip, in the broad focus declaratives ofmost varieties of Spanish, a rising F0 excursion up to the end of the nuclearword signals an H- boundary tone. Pragmatically, such movement is interpretedas a non-terminal point of a speaker’s turn in conversation and/or an incompletethought. Other than at the end of an IP, H- is generally the most highly attestedip boundary in Spanish declaratives and often combines with L +H* to form anL+H*H- nuclear ip configuration. The L- ip boundary precedes L% atIP-terminal junctures, but also appears in dislocated structures and undernarrow focus conditions (Prieto and Roseano 2010).

At this juncture, we will link our comments on pitch accents to those onnuclear prominence. Given that Spanish follows the Nuclear Stress Rule and thatthe two most highly occurring pitch accents in declaratives are L* and L+H*, wecan conclude that these two pitch accents are often the heads of prosodicphrases. Since L +H is often viewed as serving emphatic functions, its strategicimplementation in prenuclear position in order to convey narrow focus makessense (Face 2001). However, in some varieties of Spanish, there is no clearprenuclear versus nuclear pitch accent distinction; that is, L +H* occurs across

4 We are not claiming that L- is absent in our nuclear IP configurations. Based on Prieto andRoseano (2010), we deem it as given, and thus do not include it as a part of our IP-nuclearphonological representations.




the board. The similarity between all studies that have found such collapsing ofpitch accents is that they all deal with situations of Spanish in contact, forexample, with Basque (Elordieta 2003), Italian (Colantoni 2011; Colantoni andGurlekian 2004; Gabriel and Kireva 2014), Quechua (O’Rourke 2004, 2005),Veneto (Barnes and Michnowicz 2013) and Yucatec Maya (Michnowicz andBarnes 2013).

The last piece of background needed to prepare us for the content of thecurrent study is information on Afro-Hispanic intonation, which is actuallyquite limited. Lipski’s (2007) observations on the declarative intonation ofChocó in Colombia, Tacarigüita in Venezuela, Curundú in Panama and Afro-Cuban Spanish illustrate sequences of plateaus corresponding with chains ofH* tones. Along with these high, flat F0 movements go a lack of both F0valleys and downstepped movement. Furthermore, Hualde and Schwegler’s(2008) analysis of Palenquero shows many similarities to that of Lipski(2007), but they go on to argue that the high rate of H* attested intheir data can be explained as Palenqueros’ adjustment to the lexical stresspatterns of Spanish during the evolution of their language. Finally, kateyano(i.e., the Spanish spoken where Palenquero is also used) and Palenquero areexamined by Correa (2012), who claims that the intonation systems of bothcontain a similarly condensed set of phonological targets. In addition to H*,he finds L +H* to be another common pitch accent, with upstep and down-step both being employed with these two pitch accents in cases of narrowfocus. Finally, a study most closely related to the current analysis is Rao andSessarego (2016), who examine the spontaneous declarative intonation of YS.This study reports a series of differences between YS and most other vari-eties of Spanish; for example, global predominance of L +H* and L boundarytones, common use of circumflex nuclear configurations, lower levels ofdeaccenting than might be expected in spontaneous speech, evidence ofupstep as a possible means of conveying narrow focus, and a general lackof downstep across utterances. Rather than attributing these findings to theeffects of a substrate language, the authors propose that they are generatedby the nativization of intonational features that developed during an earlystage of acquisition of Spanish by members of an Afro-Bolivian speechcommunity. Given the importance of this argument to our CVS data, wewill reinitiate a discussion of YS in a later section of the present paper.

Using the body of literature summarized to this point, our goals in thecurrent paper are to: 1) analyze and describe CVS’s prenuclear and nuclearbroad focus declarative intonational phonology; 2) shed light on how its systemdiffers from those of other varieties of Spanish; 3) propose a source of thehighlighted differences.




3 Methodology

The data presented in this study were extracted from sociolinguistic interviewscarried out with six CVS male speakers during the winter of 2011–2012. Duringthis fieldwork, more than 50 informants were interviewed. However, for thepurpose of this study, we limit our analysis to the speech of a subgroup ofelderly CVS speakers. These speakers were residents of the community of ElJuncal, Chota Valley. All of them were in their 80s at the time of the interview.They were illiterate, native speakers of CVS, and did not speak any otherlanguage spoken in the region, such as Quichua.

The majority of work cited in Section 2 was carried out using controlledtasks in a laboratory setting that often require the reading of sentences orparagraphs. This type of data collection procedure is not feasible in the contextof CVS due to the lack of infrastructure in the region and to the low levels ofliteracy among many speakers. For these reasons, spontaneous interviews wereconducted. It is noteworthy that Face (2003) reports that compared to findings inlab speech, declaratives in a spontaneous corpus of Peninsular Spanish containincreased levels of both deaccenting and tonic peak alignment, in addition todecreases in both final lowering and downstepping. The variation seen inspontaneous speech can be attributed to the complexities involved in navigatingemotion, interactions with different types of interlocutors and different socialsituations, among others factors. Given that the majority of previous work onSpanish intonation uses lab methods, our spontaneous data set and the diffi-culties encountered in its analysis (which we will discuss later) add knowledgeto an existing research gap.

Concerning our data analysis, we used Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2014) tocarry out acoustic measurements of F0 alignment and height in 834 contentwords contained within a subset of broad focus declaratives extracted from fourhours of sociolinguistic interviews. One major challenge of dealing with sponta-neous data is interpreting speakers’ pragmatic intent; as such, we limited ouranalysis to declaratives that we felt sounded neutral and non-emphatic, and thatwere not about topics evoking heightened emotions.5 First, we parsed the strings

5 Clearly, classifying chunks of speech as neutral, or uttered in broad focus, is challenging. Inour approach, we excluded declarative utterances in which prosodic measures across theutterance were drastically increased relative to each of our speaker’s general prosodic patterns.After doing this, we still had examples of utterances in which one word was associated with adrastic F0 ascent, and as such, a second round of paring down the data set was carried out. Atthis point, we feel that the utterances included are as representative of broad focus conditionsas possible.




of extracted data into IPs, and then divided all IPs into ips. We located IP and ipboundaries by searching for commonly cited acoustic correlates of phraseboundaries. In our data set, such correlates ended up being lengthening ofstressed syllables and duration of pauses (Rao 2010). We documented thetypes of F0 movement that accompanied these two correlates of phrase bound-aries in order to allow for the proper transcription of IP and ip boundary tones.Since pitch accent + boundary tone configurations are important to the descrip-tion of nuclear position, we grouped each nuclear item with its followingboundary tone. Furthermore, recall that F0 behavior at ip boundaries differsbased on a given ip’s position within the larger IP. As such, our nuclearconfiguration classifications distinguished IP-final (i.e., terminal junctures) ver-sus non-IP-final contexts (i.e., non-terminal junctures). Once the set of declara-tives was organized into IPs and ips, we categorized the content words in ips asprenuclear or nuclear. The coding scheme described to this point is outlined in(2) through a generic example in which there is one IP containing six PWsparsed into three ips.

(2) Coding scheme (pn= prenuclear; n = nuclear; nt = non-terminal; t = terminal)

[ ]IP boundary (t)

[ ]ip boundary (nt) [ ]ip boundary (nt) [ ]ip boundary (t)

PWpn PWn PWn PWpn PWpn PWn

The final piece of the acoustic analysis was identifying F0 traces in or nearlexically stressed syllables, which would help dictate pitch accent classifica-tions. In each content word, we examined valley and peak alignment withrespect to the onset and offset of the stressed syllable, respectively. In order toconsider an F0 rise as a valley-to-peak excursion, the rise needed to be at least 7Hz (Rao 2009, 2010, among others).6 These observations allowed us to determinethe transcriptions of cases of bitonal pitch accents (e.g., the five pitch accentswith L and H in Figure 1). When F0 was relatively flat through a stressedsyllable, we needed to note where in the F0 range of a phrase the particulartrace was located; a higher F0 level corresponded with H*, a lower level inprenuclear position suggested deaccenting, and a lower level in nuclear positionevidenced L*. For the sake of thoroughness, all content words were also codedfor stress type, since oxytones tend to exhibit unique trends when compared to

6 We implemented this approach in order to allow for a clear comparison with previous relatedwork (e.g., Rao and Sessarego 2016). See Mertens (2004) for an alternative method.




paroxytones and proparoxytones, as well as syllable structure, since the openversus closed syllable distinction has been linked to peak alignmentdifferences.7

The pitch traces in Figures 2–4 demonstrate examples of the data analysisprocedure. Figure 2 shows a series of excursions associated with Quieren saberel tiempo de antes (‘They wanted to know about the past’). We should note thatresyllabification occurs between the final consonant of saber and the word-

Figure 2: An F0 trace of Quieren saber el tiempo de antes (‘They wanted to know about thepast’).

Figure 3: An F0 trace of Ahora están nuevos animeros (‘Now there are new witch doctors’).

7 Prieto and Torreira (2007) also found that speech rate can influence peak alignment; how-ever, we did not include it as a variable of interest due to a lack of interspeaker variation in ourdata.




initial vowel of el, and that the vowels across the boundary of de and antes arearticulated as a diphthong. The entire declarative is part of one IP that is notparsed into smaller ips. In the first two prenuclear words bearing pitchaccents, quieren and saber, valleys occur near the onset of stressed syllablesand peaks are reached within the stressed syllable rather than displacing to apost-tonic syllable. As such, both of these prenuclear words are labeled withan L +H* pitch accent. The third prenuclear word with a pitch accent, tiempo,contains an F0 plateau through its stressed syllable, and as such, carries themonotonal H* pitch accent. The nuclear word antes, whose stressed syllable isactually dean- due to resyllabification, shows a similar rise to a peak withinthe stressed syllable that we saw with the first two prenuclear words of thisutterance; therefore, it also bears an L +H* pitch accent. After this rise, there isa final fall through the last syllable of the utterance to an L% IP boundarytone. The nuclear rise-fall movement is an example of a circumflex contour.

Our second sample of F0 excursions and associated phonological targets isprovided in Figure 3, which corresponds with a production of Ahora estánnuevos animeros (‘Now there are new witch doctors’). Some unique features ofthis production are that the two vowels at the beginning of ahora form adiphthong, the final vowel of ahora is elided, and there is resyllabificationbetween ahora and están. In this IP, we see four words bearing pitch accentsthat are equally divided across two ips. In the first ip, the F0 movements throughthe prenuclear item, ahora, and the nuclear item, están, both rise to reach peakswithin their respective stressed syllables; as such, they contain L +H* pitchaccents. The lengthening of the stressed syllable of están, the subsequent drop

Figure 4: An F0 trace of Vienen de Carpuela sí de estas partes saben (‘They come from Carpuelaso yes they know about these parts’).




to a relative low, and the short pause following this word combine to indicatethe presence of an L- ip boundary. In the second ip, the F0 associated with theprenuclear nuevos and the nuclear animeros also rises through stressed syllablesand peaks within the stressed syllable of each word, meaning we have two morecases of L +H* pitch accents. The post-tonic syllable of animeros has a low F0level and is followed by a longer pause, both of which cue an L% IP boundary.When considering the two nuclear positions of Figure 3, we see that we tran-scribe both configurations the same other than the – versus % distinction usedto indicate different phrasal levels.

Finally, Figure 4 displays an F0 contour of a production of Vienen deCarpuela sí de estas partes saben (‘They come from Carpuela so yes theyknow about these parts’). In this example, the /e/ vowel that ends de and theone that begins estas combine to form one lengthened vowel. The samephenomena occurs between the /s/ consonant that is word-final in partesand the one that is word-initial in saben. Similar to what was exhibited inFigure 3, this IP is divided into two ips, each of which houses two wordscarrying pitch accents. The first ip of Figure 4 demonstrates the same trendas that of Figure 3 (i.e., two L +H* pitch accents and an L- boundary), withthe only difference being that the L- boundary tone is manifested in a post-tonic syllable. Prenuclear conditions in the second ip of Figures 3 and 4 aresimilar, but in nuclear position, we observe a key difference; that is, in Figure3, a circumflex configuration, L +H* L% concluded the IP, while in Figure 4,F0 is at a relative low in the stressed syllable of saben and continues to dropthrough the post-tonic syllable, indicating final lowering to an L* L%configuration.

4 Results

This section provides frequencies of the broad focus prenuclear pitch accentsand nuclear configurations that we observed in our acoustic analysis. Beforedetailing our CVS inventory of broad focus phonological targets, we wish tocomment on the stress patterns and stressed syllable structures we observedacross the data. First, in terms of stress pattern, 64.6% of words we analyzed areparoxtyones, 35.0% are oxytones, and 0.4% proparoxytones. Second, withrespect to stressed syllable structure, 72.3% are open and 27.7% are closed.We will return to the importance of these frequencies in the following section,after our overview of pitch accents and boundary tones.




4.1 Prenuclear position

The set of CVS broad focus declarative utterances we acoustically analyzed andphonologically labeled seems to distinguish itself from previously cited Spanishbroad focus declarative intonation tendencies. The types of prenuclear pitchaccents we found and their respective frequencies are listed in Table 1. We seethat 11.5% of prenuclear items with a stressed syllable are deaccented, or fail to

manifest evidence of a pitch accent. Of the remaining 88.5% of prenuclearlexical items that do bear pitch accents (515–59 = 456 tokens), 54.2% (247/456)are the L +H* type. This finding suggests a preference for prenuclear peakalignment within the stressed syllable in our CVS utterances, which, onemight recall, is a trend more typical of nuclear position and prenuclear narrowfocus in most dialects of Spanish. Furthermore, concerning less frequent pitchaccents in Table 1, H* occurs in 40.4% (184/456) of prenuclear words with pitchaccents. This monotonal pitch accent is almost exclusive to medial phraseposition and phonetically appears as an F0 plateau that is sustained from theprevious word’s F0 high level. This particular pitch accent is the one mostcommonly cited in previous work on Afro-Hispanic intonation. After reviewingthe top two most frequent pitch accents in our prenuclear data, a couple ofinteresting points emerge regarding infrequent patterns: not realizing a pitchaccent is actually more common than exhibiting any type other than L+H* orH*. In fact, L + >H*, the pitch accent with peak delay common to other varietiesof Spanish in broad focus declaratives, is completely absent in our prenucleardata. In sum, the observations in Table 1 reveal that the L +H* pitch accent,usually associated with nuclear position, is the prenuclear pitch accent of choicein our CVS data. When considering this result alongside H*, we can concludethat overall, a high F0 trace within the stressed syllable, as opposed to post-tonically, is a strong trend in the present broad focus data.

Table 1: Prenuclear CVS pitch accents (n= 515).

Pitch Accent Frequency

. L+H* .% (/). H* .% (/). Deaccented .% (/). H+ L* .% (/). Other .% (/)




4.2 Nuclear position

This section provides the types and frequencies of nuclear configurations foundat ip boundaries that are non-IP-final (i.e., non-terminal junctures of discourse),as well as at IP boundaries. Organizing the discussion into two subsections anddrawing comparisons between them are effective ways of better understandingsimilarities and differences in the CVS intonational phonology of two levels ofphrasing, and how the nuclear configurations of CVS in general compare to thetrends seen in many dialects of Spanish referenced in Section 2.

4.2.1 Non-terminal configurations

The analysis of 197 non-IP-final pitch accent + ip boundary tone sequences ispresented in this subsection. Table 2 shows that the L +H* pitch accent is themost frequent, as one would expect in Spanish in general; summing theinstances of this pitch accent in rows one and five of Table 2, plus 13 casesfrom row six, informs us that it comprises 47.2% (93/197) of all nuclear pitchaccents. Overall, the next most common nuclear pitch accent is the monotonalH*, which makes up 25.9% (51/197) of the total, as seen when considering rowthree and the 15 examples from row six. Another monotonal nuclear pitchaccent, L*, is the third most common even though such pitch suppression ismore common in IP-final position. In terms of ip boundary tones, it is quitenoteworthy that the L- rather than the H- variety is the dominant target at anon-terminal discourse juncture because this trend opposes the findings ofprevious research. The preference for L- is revealed by combining the totals forthe top four rows of Table 2, in addition to four tokens from row six; the totalcomes out to 82.7% (163/197). In stark contrast, M- and H- jointly form just

Table 2: Nuclear configurations in ips that are non-IP-final(n= 197).

Configuration Frequency

. L+H*L- .% (/). L*L- .% (/). H*L- .% (/). H+ L*L- .% (/). L+H*M- .% (/). Ten others .% (/)




17.3% of the produced ip boundary tones. In fact, across the data set, there areonly seven instances of the commonly cited H- (all of which are part of tokensin row six), meaning this boundary tone does not appear to be essential to thecommunication of a continuation of a thought in our CVS data. Interestingly,when considering the results of both L- and M-, we see that non-terminalbreaks occur almost exclusively at lower intonational levels than one mightpredict for non-terminal discourse junctures. Thus far, our discussion in thissection demonstrates that the most common CVS nuclear configuration isL +H*L-. This tonal configuration corresponds with a circumflex contour,which typically is tied to serving pragmatic functions at IP boundaries, orconclusions of a thought, rather than at ip boundaries. On the other hand, L-has been previously linked to less common structures like dislocations, and isexhibited more with L* rather than L +H* at ip junctures.

4.2.2 Terminal configurations

The final results section provides a breakdown of 122 sequences of pitchaccent + IP boundary tones located at points in discourse at which an ideais being completed. Concerning the pitch accents in Table 3, the frequenciesdisplayed show that the monotonal L*, tied to nuclear F0 suppression, andL +H* are clearly the two preferred varieties at the conclusion of a thought.However, their ranking is reversed when compared to the non-terminal datapresented in the previous subsection. Furthermore, L% is almost categorically(98.2%, 164/167 tokens) selected as the IP boundary tone in our CVS data.Therefore, when combining the pitch accent and boundary tone analyses, wenote that the final lowering configuration (L*L%) is produced most fre-quently, followed by a circumflex contour (L +H*L%). It appears that ourspeakers utilize distinct pitch accents in their IP-nuclear configurations ofbroad focus declaratives, potentially in order to convey subtle pragmaticdistinctions. Overall, when unifying the discussion of two levels of phrasing

Table 3: Nuclear configurations at the end of IPs (n= 122).


. L*L% .% (/). L+H*L% .% (/). H*L% .% (/). Four others .% (/)




from Tables 2 and 3, the most noteworthy findings are that both levels favorthe same variety of phrase boundary, L, and that the same two configurationsare the two most frequent at both levels.

5 Discussion

The goal of this study was to acoustically analyze word– and phrase–levelphonological targets in order to provide a preliminary analysis of the prenuclearand nuclear intonation of CVS’s broad focus declaratives. At the word level, onefinding that stood out was that variants of L +H* were the most frequent pre-nuclear and nuclear (non-terminal) pitch accent. The high degree of L +H* andthe complete absence of L + >H* in prenuclear position was most strikingbecause most dialects of Spanish, including that of Quito (O’Rourke 2010),exhibit patterns in which the latter is more common than the former (Face2001; Hualde 2002; Prieto and Roseano 2010). It is important to highlight thatL +H* is a pitch accent that occurs more commonly in nuclear position, which istypically viewed as being a prosodic head and thus holding relative prominencein Spanish. Overall, the prenuclear results, in particular, reveal that a pitchaccent generally communicating salience appears to have expanded its usefurther than what is commonly observed in Spanish; that is, the phonologicaldistinction between L+ >H* and L +H* associated with degrees of relativeprominence in broad focus does not seem to be a part of our CVS speakers’intonational system. Finally, we should also note that while H* appears at arelatively high frequency in our prenuclear data, a second round of analysesrevealed that it occurs primarily in cases of tonal clash. Thus, based on our data,it is probably not the default pitch accent in this context but rather condition bylinguistic context.8

Furthermore, in ip- and IP-nuclear position, corresponding with non-term-inal and terminal discourse junctures, respectively, L +H* and L* were the twomost frequent pitch accents; however, at the ip-level, L +H* was preferred, whileat the IP-level, the opposite was the case. At the ip-level in broad focus, L +H* isquite common in most varieties of Spanish because a boundary tone impedespeak displacement, but L* is not highly observed. On the other hand, at the IP-level, many varieties use suppression to L* to clearly signal the conclusion of an

8 We acknowledge that this could be a unique feature of our data set, and thus, by no meansare we discounting the claims of Hualde and Schwegler (2008) and Lipski (2007), who arguethat H* is a typical feature of Afro-Hispanic intonation.




idea, while others prefer circumflex contours with an L+H*. Combining thesenuclear pitch accent results indicates that while variation is present in the data,perhaps due to subtle pragmatic effects, the most frequent pitch accents at bothphrase levels generally reflect those of standard Spanish with the exceptionbeing L* at the ip-level, which might be evidence of generalizing the preferredIP-level pitch accent to the lower phrase level.

Given the overall high rate of L +H* pitch accents across our data, we mustaddress whether previously cited influences on peak alignment could haveplayed a role in our outcomes. Recall that oxytonic stress and closed syllableshave been associated with more of this early aligned pitch accent (Hualde 2002;Llisterri et al. 1995; Prieto and Torreira 2007). However, in our data, paroxytonesand open syllables were the overwhelmingly dominant stress pattern and sylla-ble structure, respectively. As such, we do not find clear evidence that our pitchaccent findings are driven primarily by this pair of linguistic variables, both ofwhich previous research (on lab speech) has found to be significant.

One of the most interesting results, and one that has not been cited much inany variety of Spanish (contact or non-contact), is that the L boundary tone wasthe overwhelmingly dominant trend at both levels of phrasing, or at bothterminal and non-terminal points in discourse. This suggests an absence of thephonological distinction that communicates the continuation or conclusion of athought found in the H versus L contrast in the broad focus declaratives of manyvarieties of Spanish, including that of Quito (O’Rourke 2010). Combining thediscussion of nuclear pitch accents and boundary tones uncovered that the twomost frequent configurations at both the ip and IP levels were the same (butwith a reverse frequency ranking of pitch accents), L +H*/L* + an L boundary. Insum, examining the nuclear intonation of our CVS broad focus declarativesimplies that speakers have a similar inventory of targets manifested at bothphrase boundaries, which, in turn suggests that they do not have stronglydistinguishable intonational strategies to tease apart the continuation/conclu-sion function of the two types of junctures, which would have communicativeconsequences for turn-taking strategies if implemented in other varieties ofSpanish. That is, there is evidence of at least some degree of replicating phono-logical targets from one phrasal level to another. The consequence of suchreplication is a reduced set of phonological targets implemented in broadfocus declaratives. In fact, the notion of copying a prosodic template from onelocation to another can be extended to the L +H* nuclear pitch accent’s exten-sion to prenuclear position in our data.

After outlining the principle ways in which our CVS broad focus declarativedata demonstrate differences from trends cited in previous literature on Spanishintonation, most of which has been conducted using lab methods, a valid issue




that arises is the role that the spontaneous style of speech played in accountingfor the current results. Recall that Face (2003) described differences between theintonation of spontaneous and lab speech. While we must consider speech styledifferences as having some role in the comparison of our findings versus thoseof some previous studies, we believe that the main divergences between ourdata and other studies have to do with the special contact situation thatcharacterized the evolution of CVS.

The replication and simplification of phonological targets reported in ouranalysis of CVS could be accounted for by considering the linguistic evolution ofthe speech community in question. Spanish was acquired as an L2 by the firstwave of forebears of our speakers. In general, in the process of L2 acquisition,obstacles arise during attempts at verbal interactions, and one manner in whichinterlocutors navigate such circumstances is by using emphatic or default com-municative strategies (Herschensohn 2000; Sessarego 2013a).9 Presumably, theforebears of our speakers experienced such communicative difficulties, indepen-dent of the specific African languages they might have spoken as L1s. Thissuggests that an emphatic or default set of phonological targets would overridemore complicated options involving nuanced pragmatic meanings. Therefore,we could propose that once this set of targets (e.g., L + H* pitch accent and Lboundary tones) was selected and utilized by the first generation of CVS speak-ers, it was passed down and perpetuated within the same speech community,and as such, has been incorporated as the main set of targets in the broad focusdeclaratives of our speakers. This is what we labeled elsewhere as “a nativiza-tion process” (L1 acquisition) of advanced L2 features (cf. Sessarego 2013a; Raoand Sessarego 2016).

Recall that, along these lines, situations of Spanish in contact have attestedthe prenuclear use of the L +H* pitch accent. While some researchers havediscussed intonational reduction/simplification phenomena as arising due tothe influence of a substrate language (Colantoni 2011; Colantoni and Gurlekian2004; Elordieta 2003; Gabriel and Kireva 2014; O’Rourke 2004, 2005),Michnowicz and Barnes (2013) and Barnes and Michnowicz (2013) have actuallyproposed a potential simplification process driven by SLA strategies. We wouldlike to suggest that the implications of our CVS data further support this SLA-based approach, since they would also provide a feasible explanation for whyall these Spanish contact varieties present very similar intonational configura-tions even though the pitchaccent systems of the substrate languages are highlyvariable (cf. also Rao and Sessarego 2016 on this point).

9 Cf. also Velupillai (2015: 141ff) on the notion of “foreign talk” in creole studies.




Our CVS data suggest that some intonational differentiations usuallyemployed in standard Spanish to indicate clear pragmatic contrasts (i.e.,perceptual salience/emphasis through pitch accents, continuation versus con-clusion of an idea through boundary tones) are not present in this Afro-Andeandialect. In fact, our findings point to a simplified set of phonological targetsacross the PW, ip and IP levels. Examples (3) and (4) provide a graphicrepresentation of the differences we have just illustrated using same generic,unmarked declarative sentence in both general Spanish and CVS. As one canobserve, (3) and (4) consist of six content words, each containing a stressedsyllable, spread across two ips, both of which belong to one IP. The mainphenomenon of interest in the comparison of these two examples is the lack ofvariation in pitch accents and boundary tones in (4) in the top three prosodictiers illustrated.

(3) General Trend in SpanishIP [ ]L%ip [ ]H-[ ]L-PW PW PW PW PW PW PW

L+ >H*, L + >H*, L + H* L+ >H*, L + >H*, L*/L + H*Syllable σ σ σ σ σ σ

(4) CVSIP [ ]L%ip [ ]L- [ ]L-PW PW PW PW PW PW PW

L+ H*, L + H*, L + H*/L* L + H*, L + H*, L*/L + H*Syllable σ σ σ σ σ σ

It is quite interesting that the findings presented for CVS align closely withthose encountered by Rao and Sessarego (2016) in their study on YS, anotherAfro-Andean variety for which a (de)creolization hypothesis does not appearto be clearly supported (Sessarego and Gutiérrez-Rexach 2011; Sessarego2013c, 2014b, 2016a). Tables 4–6 provide the results for prenuclear pitchaccents, and boundary tones –at both the ip and IP levels– in YS. Onedifference between the current study and Rao and Sessarego (2016: 52–55)is that they included some individual words that were perceived asemphasized in their data set, whereas we did not, which is one reason whyTables 4–6 contain several upstepped and downstepped variants.




The results of Tables 4–6 reflect those of Tables 1–3 with one exception:IP-nuclear configurations favor L*L% in CVS but L +H*L% in YS. This poten-tially suggests that the pragmatic meaning associated with IP-final configura-tions (i.e., conclusion of a thought) in neutral declaratives developed

Table 4: YS pitch accents in prenuclear position.

Pitch Accent Frequency

L+H* .% (/)H* .% (/)¡L+H* .% (/)!H* .% (/)L+ ¡H* .% (/)L+ >H* .% (/)H+ L* .% (/)¡H* .% (/)

Table 5: YS pitch accent+ ip boundary configurations at non-terminal junctures.


L+H*L- .% (/)L+H*H- .% (/)L+ ¡H*L- .% (/)L+H*M- .% (/)H*L- .% (/)L*L- .% (/)¡L+H*L- .% (/)Other .% (/)

Table 6: YS pitch accent+ IP boundary configuration at terminaljunctures.


L+H*L% .% (/)L+ ¡H*L% .% (/)L*L% .% (/)H*L% .% (/)¡L+H*L% .% (/)Other .% (/)




differently in the former than in the latter Afro-Hispanic variety, with the latterdemonstrating the final lowering trend typical of many varieties of Spanish.The reason for this merits additional exploration. Despite this one difference,the overall results for CVS and YS spontaneous declaratives are remarkablysimilar. We account for this parallelism by proposing that these results in bothvarieties may be interpreted in terms of contact-induced phenomena related toa process of L1 acquisition of advanced L2 strategies (Sessarego 2013a), whichappear to be hampered by processability constraints applying at the discourse-intonation interface. Thus, as we pointed out earlier, we claim that fundamen-tal to the development of these dialects was the input of advanced L2 speakersof Spanish who failed to acquire the complete (monolingual) set of intona-tional targets. This resulted in default patterns containing the L +H* pitchaccent and the L boundary tone. Such patterns were subsequently acquiredas part of the L1 of following CVS and YS generations, and thus, they werenativized. This phenomenon led to the conventionalization in these dialects ofdefault intonational forms, which should not be attributed to any specificsubstrate language, but rather to more universal processes of L2 acquisition.Such processes appear to be at work each time a speaker is learning Spanish asan L2 (cf. Henriksen 2013), independent of the L1 he/she is coming from (cf.Michnowicz and Barnes 2013; Winford 2003).

Upon closer examination, the presence of these phonological default pat-terns in CVS and YS is not that surprising. In fact, these discourse-intonationinterface features may be seen as reductions of language complexities,which have been systematically detected in SLA studies and in the AHLAs fora variety of interface-driven grammatical phenomena: (1) use of non-emphaticnon-contrastive overt subjects (syntax-discourse interface) (Sorace 2004; Soraceand Serratrice 2009); (2) reduced phi-agreement across the DP and CP (syntax-morphology interface) (Gutiérrez-Rexach and Sessarego 2014; Sessarego 2013d;Sessarego and Gutiérrez-Rexach 2011; Slabakova 2009); (3) presence of barenouns in subject position (syntax-semantics interface) (García Mayo andHawkins 2009; Gutiérrez-Rexach and Sessarego 2011; Sessarego 2014b).

In line with current advances in the field of language development, weadopt some of the recent hypotheses that have been proposed to account forthe non-target-like attainment of advanced L2 speakers and suggest that con-structions requiring high processing demands on the interface between differentlinguistic modules tend to present significant challenges for non-native speakersacquiring an L2 (Sorace 2011; Sorace and Serratrice 2009). Thus, we ascribe theprosodic patterns encountered in CVS to an incomplete acquisition of the dis-course-phonology interface, and more generally, we claim that the majority ofthe phenomena that have traditionally been ascribed to a previous (de)




creolization phase may actually be conceived as advanced, conventionalized L2features that pose particular demands on different linguistic interfaces (i.e.,syntax-semantics, syntax-discourse, syntax-morphology).

The notion of language as a modular system composed of different interfa-cing units is a fundamental assumption of generative grammar. This idea maybe graphically pictured by recurring to Jackendoff’s (1997, 2002) model oflinguistic interface architecture, here reported in Figure 5. This model, in fact,allows for a parallel dialogue among different linguistic modules. It does notembrace ‘syntacticocentrism’ and attempts to integrate language with othercognitive faculties (Burkhardt 2005; Reinhart 2006; for different proposals onthe nature of language faculty architecture).

Our analysis on the evolution of the AHLAs is in contrast with the traditionalview, which would ascribe their non-standard features to a previous creolestage (Granda 1968, 1970; Otheguy 1973; Schwegler 1999). Certain proposals, infact, suggest an evolutionary path for CVS, YS and other AHLAs according towhich pidgins became creoles and then eventually decreolized (Perez 2015;Schwegler 2014). These models are indirectly implying that certain aspects ofthese Afro-Hispanic vernaculars can be traced back to grammatical phenom-ena found in early interlanguages of a pidgin-type (Plag 2008a, 2008b, 2009a,2009b).

Figure 5: Jackendoff’s language faculty architecture.




Our hypothesis, on the other hand, diverges quite significantly from thesetraditional assumptions. In particular, we claim that the vast majority of thenon-standard features found in the AHLAs can actually be related to advancedinterlanguages (Sessarego 2013a), which do not imply either a pidgin-to-creolephase or a subsequent decreolization process. Moreover, this model is alsosupported by the sociohistorical information available for Afro-AndeanSpanish (Sessarego 2013b, 2014b, 2015) as well as for a number other AHLAs(Clements 2009; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2016b). Such information, in fact,strongly suggests that the sociohistorical conditions for Spanish creoles toemerge were not in place in Spanish America.

For these reasons, given the linguistic and historical evidence availablefor CVS, we suggest that this black vernacular formed in rural, isolatedvillages, far away from the social pressure posed by formal education,standardization, and the linguistic norm. In such a scenario, advancedprocesses of L2 acquisition, such as the prosodic patterns we detected,could crystallize and be conventionalized in the speech community. Hence,it is still possible to observe them today in the vernacular spoken by theelderly residents we interviewed in El Juncal (Sessarego 2011a, 2011b). On theother hand, claiming that decreolization is responsible for CVS as it iscurrently spoken would imply that our illiterate, elderly informants hadsuch intense contact with standard Spanish during the past fifty years thatthey learned a very close approximation to it at an advanced age while alsoalmost completely abandoning their creole-like mother tongue. This is quiteunlikely.

6 Conclusion

In this article, we provided a preliminary glimpse into the prenuclear andnuclear broad focus declarative intonation of CVS, drew some comparisonsbetween our results and those of previous work on both Afro- and non-Afrovarieties of Spanish, and suggested a non-substrate-based way of accounting forour findings. We filled gaps in research by analyzing data coming from sponta-neous interviews rather than controlled speech samples and focusing on anAfro-Hispanic variety whose intonational patterns had received little to noattention in the small body of existing literature on Afro-Hispanic intonation.The main merit of our conventionalized L2 proposal is that it is an overarchingway of explaining language variation and change across many acquisitionalcontexts/language contact situations. However, we do acknowledge that this




proposal needs further support in future work by incorporating syntactic struc-ture into the discussion of the declaratives analyzed, including a wider range ofutterance types and pragmatic scopes, increasing connections with existingliterature on the L2 acquisition of Spanish intonation, and looking at otherexplorations of the universal properties of phonology (cf. Gooden et al. 2009;Plummer and Beckman 2015).

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