Prosodic manifestations of politeness in Porteño Spanish wh-interrogatives: terminal contours, f0 mitigation and syllable durations

Abstract

International audiencePoliteness is often described as being prosodically cued through higher F0, as per the Frequency Code premises [12-14, 21, 25], and a slower speech rate [10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 20, 23, 27]. In Porteño Spanish, opposite findings [2, 6, 8] regarding wh-interrogatives' pitch contours were attributed to a mark of politeness. The analysis of 280 wh-interrogatives produced by nine speakers of Porteño Spanish, within colloquial and polite contexts, allowed us to determine that politeness does not actually favour higher F0. On the contrary, politeness is expressed by F0 mitigation through lowered overall pitch and reduced span. Our results also refute [26]'s hypothesis that interrogative adverbs would make utterances containing them more sensitive to politeness. In Porteño Spanish, adverbs do not pilot rising terminal contours to signal politeness. As for syllable durations, lengthening did not occur and speech rate kept constant in our corpus in the polite condition