Intonation across Spanish, in the tones and break indices framework

This paper describes some of the more salient intonational phenomena of Spanish, and reviews several of the most pressing questions that remain to be addressed before a definitive model of the system can be incorporated into a consensus transcription system for the language. The phenomena reviewed include the metrical underpinnings of the tune, and some of the local tone shapes that are anchored at stressed syllables or at phrase edges in several common intonation contours. The description of known facts is couched in the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology, as is the review of outstanding questions. The description is used to motivate the preliminary transcription conventions proposed by the Spanish ToBI development group. 1. Who and what is Sp_ToBI? The study of Spanish intonation has a long and illustrious history, beginning with the seminal observations of Navarro Tomás in the first half of the previous century (Navarro Tomás, 1918, 1939, 1944). The 1944 monograph, in particular, was monumental for the size of the corpus on which it is based and for its breadth of coverage of the tonemas (i.e., “tones ” in the British school sense of the term). Navarro Tomás was also the first researcher to systematically describe some of the major differences among dialects, such as the us