Dedialectalisation of intonational patterns of yes-no questions in León, Zamora, Salamanca, and Palencia

Abstract

This work studies intonational patterns of yes-no questions of five speakers from the provincial capitals of León, Zamora, Salamanca, Palencia and Valladolid using the Sp_ToBI annotation system. For the provinces studied, a co-occurrence of descending (L%) and rising (H%) question patterns is found. These patterns correspond to a traditional pattern and to the pattern of standard Spanish respectively, so the coexistence of both will lead us to propose a process of standardisation or dedialectalisation that is affecting the intonational patterns of the varieties of these peripheral territories in the northwest of Castile.

Keywords

• Intonation
• Linguistic change
• Absolute interrogatives
• Spanish ToBI
• Dialectology