Tonicity and informative structure in possessives: A comparative analysis of European Spanish

Abstract

In this paper we have analyzed the acoustic cues of Spanish stress (duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency) in the possessive mi in order to discover dialect differences between the North and the South of Peninsular Spanish. For this purpose, we have compared the possessives of three towns in the North and three in the South of Spain, using the recordings of the corpus COSER. Results empirically show that the values of duration, amplitude, and F0 in the possessives of both zones are similar, contradicting the literature on the topic. However, in Asturias the possessives have an accent linked to the left periphery and conditioned by the information structure of the sentence. This fact would explain the stressed values in the literature: the possessives in Asturias hold an accent (not stress) in specific positions different to other varieties.