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Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World
Edited by Kate Bellamy, Michael W. Child, Paz González, Antje Muntendam and M. Carmen Parafita Couto
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 13] 2017
► pp. 149–172

Chapter 7
Prosodic transfer among Spanish-K’ichee’ bilinguals

| Middlebury College

This chapter presents a case of prosodic transfer among Spanish-K’ichee’ (Mayan) bilinguals from two communities in Guatemala: Nahualá and Cantel. Specifically, it analyzes the use of duration to mark contrastive focus in both Spanish and K’ichee’. The results of a production task demonstrate that there is a phonological restriction on the use of a longer duration to mark contrastive focus in Nahualá K’ichee’ but not in Cantel K’ichee’. The surface pattern of this restriction is transferred into the prosodic contrastive focus marking of the Spanish of several bilinguals from Nahualá. However, this prosodic transfer is more likely to occur among Nahualá females and in stress patterns that are present in both languages, i.e., word-final stress.

Keywords: prosodic transfer, duration, focus marking, Guatemalan Spanish, K’ichee’
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Focus and focus marking
    • 2.1Focus marking in K’ichee’
    • 2.2Focus marking in Spanish
  • 3.The present study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Methodology
      • 3.2.1Experimental design
      • 3.2.2K’ichee’ materials
      • 3.2.3Spanish materials
      • 3.2.4Procedure
      • 3.2.5Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1K’ichee’ results
    • 4.2Spanish oxytones results
    • 4.3Spanish paroxytones results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 31 May 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.13.07bai
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