Relevance and attribution in the intonation of Gran Canaria Spanish interrogatives

Abstract

An insightful account of the mechanisms which underlie the association of prosodic patterns with pragmatic meanings is absent inmost descriptions of the prosody of interrogative utterances in Spanish. The approach inEscandell-Vidal (1998)for European PeninsularSpanish responds by appealing to the linguistic distinctionneutral/markedfor interrogatives, together with the conceptsrelevanceandattributionas used in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995). Our present study, analysing further data from Gran CanariaSpanish interrogatives (based onCabrera-Abreu and Vizcaíno-Ortega, 2010) in the light of Relevance Theory, reveals that such alinguistic distinction requires an explicit statement as to whether it applies prosodically (marked/unmarkedtunes) or pragmatically(neutral/non-neutralmeanings). In addition, the restrictive behaviour proposed forattribution(it correlates with marked intonation patternsonly, and its type is tightly bound to a single intonation pattern) must be relaxed in order to accommodate the cases of the unmarkedintonation tune, and of a single marked tune charged with two different attribution types. The resulting framework enables us tounderstand better the nature of interrogative meanings and tunes, together with their actual mappings; to predict potential tune-meaningassociations; and to exclude ill-formed tune-meaning connections.© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved