3 research outputs found
Vocative Intonation in Language Contact: The Case of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish
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 vowel reduction in unstressed position : an ultrasound and acoustic investigation
Vowel reduction in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian (CSB) has been variously claimed to involve raising, no change or lowering of the high vowels /iəu/. There is a general agreement that the low vowels /ɛaɔ/ are raised when unstressed. This paper directly measures tongue height using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) and relates this measure to the acoustic correlate F1 at vowel midpoint. The six vowels of CSB were paired with respect to frontness (/ɛ, i/, /a, ə/, /ɔ, u/), and the overlap in height of the unstressed lower vowel in each pair was assessed relative to (a) its stressed counterpart and (b) the stressed and (c) unstressed realisations of the lower vowel. There was no evidence of the higher unstressed vowel in each pair being different from its stressed counterpart. The articulatory and acoustic results are not completely aligned, but both diverge from the traditional model of vowel reduction in CSB