The Canary Islands intonation: influence of the corpus of speech on the use of intonational patterns

Abstract

This paper compares the acoustic analysis of the F0 of a formal and spontaneous corpus of declarative and interrogative sentences issued by twelve informants, women and men uneducated as well as with higher education, from urban and rural areas of two islands of the Canary Islands, El Hierro and Fuerteventura. Our aim is to check whether the results obtained in the formal corpus will also apply to different speech situations. The acoustic analysis is complemented with a phoneticphonemic labeling being part of the Autosegmental-Metric model under the guidelines set out in Dorta (ed. 2013). The fixed or formal corpus consists of a total of 648 sentences, and 546 the spontaneous one. The results underline the presence in the corpus of the same basic declarative intonational pattern in the declarative sentences. In the case of interrogative sentences in El Hierro, it is recorded a rising scheme that disappears in favor of the circumflex characteristic of the languages and dialects of the Canary Islands according to an increasing degree of spontaneity of speech. This pattern is constant at all levels of speech in Fuerteventura.