The intonation of the yes/no questions by Spanish learners of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This paper presents the melodic characteristics of the yes/no questions of Spanish, analysed on the assumptions of Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) (Cantero, 2002; Cantero and Font-Rotchés, 2007, 2009). Dialogues of Brazilian university students from Rio de Janeiro compose the corpus. Those dialogues were recorded in a pilot Spanish course, Idioma ssem Fronteiras (Spanish) that was offered by  Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in 2016. Results indicate that Spanish learners produced patterns similar to the one observed in Spanish from Spain. Nevertheless, the percentages of rising final inflection were lower. To a lesser extent, learners used a pattern described for Brazilian Portuguese, which in Spanish of Spain has emphatic meaning, rather than interrogative meaning.