Vocative Intonation in Language Contact

The Case of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish

Bibliographic Data

ID5900415
AuthorsJonas Grünke (0000-0001-8893-6484, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, corresponding author), Bistra Andreeva (0000-0003-2774-1346, Saarland University), C Gabriel (0000-0002-9967-1159, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz), Mitko Sabev (0000-0002-1580-7275, Saarland University)
Year2023
Volume8
Issue4
Pages284
Publication date2023-12-08
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguages (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages8040284
OpenAlexW4389481962
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited42

The present study investigates the prosodic realization of calling contours by bilingual speakers of Bulgarian and (Bulgarian) Judeo-Spanish and monolingual speakers of Bulgarian in a discourse completion task across three pragmatic contexts: (i) neutral (routine) context-calling a child from afar to come in for dinner; (ii) positive context-calling a child from afar to get a present; and (iii) negative (or urgent) context-calling a child from afar for a chastising. Through quantitative analyses of the F0 span between tonal landmarks, alignment of pitch peaks, intensity, and durational and prominence patterns, we systematically account for the phonetic characteristics of the contours and determine their tonal composition and meaning, thereby situating them within the intonation systems of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish and Bulgarian. It is shown that both languages use the same inventory of contours: (1) L+H* !H-% (the so-called "vocative chant"), (2) L+H* H-L%, and (3) L+H* L-%. However, their distribution differs across contexts and varieties. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Bulgarian, on the one hand, predominantly use (1) and (2) in neutral and positive contexts and clearly prefer (3) in negative contexts. In Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish, the bilinguals also more often recur to (3) in neutral and positive contexts and generally show more variation

Bulgarian · Context (archaeology · Intonation (linguistics · Linguistics · Meaning (existential · Physics · Realization (probability · Variation (astronomy · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access