Canarian Spanish intonation: interrogative utterances

Previous accounts of Spanish intonation have looked at numerous dialectal varieties, but very few have actually incorporated a systematic description of the variety of Spanish found on the island of Gran Canaria (Canary Islands) in their study. When this has been included, the analysis has been either impressionistic or based on such a reduced sample of data that it logically prevents the author from making strong claims about this accent. In this paper, we put forward a detailed description of question contours found in the variety of Spanish spoken in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (hence, LPGC-Spanish) in order to offer a more complete picture of this type of utterance within the framework of a Pan Spanish ToBI model of intonation. The questions studied here fall under two categories —yes/no questions and wh-questions — and we aim both at the analysis of their phonological form, and at the relationship between form and the pragmatic meanings conveyed