AN ANALYSIS OF INTONATION PATTERNS IN ECUADORIAN CUENCANO SPANISH: A SP_ToBI DESCRIPTION

El Cantado Cuencano ‘Cuencano singing’ constitutes the hallmark of Cuenca citizens. This colloquially described intonational feature is what makes Cuencano Spanish one of the most prosodically interesting Andean dialects in the country of Ecuador. There is, however, a lack of scientific research conducted on this dialect’s intonation, which can be considered as under-documented up to this point. Therefore, the main objective of the present study was to begin to analyze and document Cuencano Spanish intonation patterns. In addition, this research also aimed to provide scientific evidence and draw plausible conclusions to support or refute the impressionistic observations about the Indigenous origins of Cuencano singing. A sample of 550 utterances produced by 5 male and 5 female participants was collected in order to conduct this research. The sample comprised 11 categories that included declarative statements, yes/no questions, exclamative statements, wh-questions, imperatives, lists, conditionals, tag-questions, interjections, negative statements, and vocatives. The tokens were analyzed using Praat and labeled by implementing the Spanish version of the Tones and Break Indices system (Sp_ToBI). It was found that the presence of the emphatic pitch accent labeled as L+^H* and the high frequency appearance of bitonal pitch accents, such as L+H* and H+L*, in almost every token in the data set suggest that Cuencanos speak with a variety of degrees of tonal emphasis. This translates into a mixture of a substantial number of rising and falling tones found in Cuencanos’ speech. These findings account for the appearance of the highly marked singing quality of Cuencano Spanish or Cantado Cuencano. They may also be linked to impressionistic descriptions, such as esdrujulizacion, and the influence that Indigenous languages and culture had on Cuencano Spanish