Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Assoc. (HaLLA) Meeting

Presenter: Meghann Peace

Within the field of second language acquisition, little work has been done on the acquisition of Spanish intonation by adult native speakers of English. Nibert (2005) offers as evidence the lack of transparency in the structure and meaning of intonation, and Ladd (2008) notes that the paralinguistic and emotion-based characteristics often associated with intonation cause many to see it as a non-linguistic feature in non-tonal languages such as Spanish.

However, the Autosegmental-Metrical approach, as developed by Pierrehumbert (1980), has paved the way for a number of studies that deal with Spanish intonation as a linguistic and phonological characteristic of the language (e.g., Face, 2002; Hualde, 2003; Nibert, 2000; Sosa, 1999 and Willis, 2003). Although these studies deal with Spanish as a native language, the Autosegmental-Metrical framework used in them can be extended to analyze non-native Spanish as well.

This paper makes use of the Autosegmental-Metrical framework to examine the phonetic characteristics of key intonational events in the speech of non-native adult learners of Spanish. In order to examine the acquisition of dialect-specific intonation and to allow for the direct comparison of non-native Spanish with the native Spanish target intonation, the participants chosen for this study were native English speakers who were involved in romantic relationships with native Spanish speakers. The native English speakers produced Spanish utterances in a laboratory setting, the intonation patterns of which were then compared to their own English utterances and to the same Spanish utterances as produced by their partners.

The results indicate that acquisition of Spanish intonation patterns by native English speakers is possible. Additionally, the native English speakers' motivation to speak in Spanish with their partners is a factor that contributes to the successful acquisition of their partners' dialect-specific intonation patterns.

Presenter: Alicia M.Ocampo

El presente trabajo analiza características sintácticas, semánticas, pragmáticas y discursivas de las dos construcciones transitivas ejemplificadas en el título. La noción de transitividad ha sido considerada prototípica (Taylor 1989; Hopper y Thompson 1980); o sea, que existen construcciones más transitivas que otras. Mi hipótesis propone que, entre ambas construcciones, la transitividad es mayor en las que presentan duplicación del OD, y por esto aparecen destacadas (salient) dentro del contexto. El uso de la construcción con duplicación en la variedad del Río de la Plata está motivado por dos factores: la topicalización del Objeto Directo/Paciente y/o la intencionalidad destacada del Sujeto/Agente. La construcción transitiva es un fenómeno de un complejo juego de significados y puede ser utilizado por el hablante según sus diferentes necesidades comunicativas.

El análisis se basa en un corpus de veinte horas de conversaciones informales grabadas en La Plata, Argentina. Se han incluido emisiones de 26 hablantes de clase media (15 mujeres y 11 varones) entre las edades de 31 y 76 años. En total fueron analizadas 424 construcciones transitivas, de las que 50 presentan duplicación del OD.