This article deals with the intonational realization of
contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation
studies with a total of ten bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and
Yucatec Maya (YM) and five monolingual speakers of YS suggest that contrastive
focus in the Yucatecan Spanish variant spoken by the Spanish-dominant and
monolingual speakers is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the
intonation phrase (IP) followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a
contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety crucially differs
from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive
constituent is generally associated with an L+H* pitch accent (cf. de-la-Mota, Martín Butragueño & Prieto.
2010). However, the systematicity described above only shows up in
the data produced by the Spanish-dominant and monolingual YS speakers, whereas
the balanced bilingual data is characterized by much higher idiosyncratic
variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems is
also a matter of consolidation or strengthening of features.
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