Otro acento vizcaíno: Getxo

Abstract

In this article, the prosodic system ofthe Basque dialect of Getxo is described and analyzed. This system can be considered as belonging to the Gernika pitch-accent type. There are, nevertheless, some interesting differences with respect to the prosodic system of the Gernika area, both in surface tonal patterns and in the rule-system. It is shown that only certain low tones are present in underlying representations and, that the only prosodic rule that applies in the lexical phonological component is the assignment of a high tone to one syllable in the word. From these underspecfied representations, the surface patterns are obtained by phonetic interpolation, as in Pierrehumbert and Beckman's (1988) analysis of Japanese.