Topic of the conference

There is a growing field of research on phonetic and phonological issues of language contact and bilingualism/multilingualism, showing the influence of one language or language variety over another (henceforth LV-A and LV-B). Aspects of suprasegmental phonology have started receiving more attention, especially in prosody and intonation. See, among others, Elordieta (2003), Mennen (2004), Colantoni & Gurlekian (2004), O’Rourke (2005, 2012), Elordieta & Calleja (2005), Alvord (2006), Romera et al. (2008), Simonet (2008, 2010, 2011), Queen (2012), Robles-Puente (2012, 2019), Romera & Elordieta (2013, 2019), van Rijswijk & Muntendam (2014), Elordieta & Irurtzun (2016), Muntendam & Torreira (2016), Masa & Elordieta (2017), Troncoso-Ruiz & Elordieta (2017), Lai & Gooden (2018), Kozminska (2019), Baltazani et al. (2019a, 2019b), Congosto Martín (2019), Fernández Planas et al. (2019), Fernández Rei (2019), Muñiz-Cachón (2019), Uth (2019), Elordieta & Romera (to appear). However, the presence of features of LV-A in LV-B is variable within the contact population. That is, speakers of LV-A may present different frequencies of occurrence of a given feature of LV-B, or, in other words, not all speakers of LV-A may adopt the feature or show its presence with the same consistency. Age, gender and educational level may play a role in such differences, but recent work reveals the importance of other social factors as well. On the one hand, the degree of contact of speakers of LV-A with speakers of LV-B. On the other, the attitudes of speakers of LV-A towards LV-B or the LV-B ethnolinguistic group. These factors may correlate with differences in the degree of presence of features of LV-B in LV-A.

For instance, Romera & Elordieta (2013) show that in the Catalan-speaking island of Majorca monolingual speakers of Iberian Spanish adopt intonational features of the variety of Spanish with influence from Catalan spoken by Majorcans. However, the presence of such features (nuclear configurations in yes/no questions) is heterogeneous among non-Majorcans. The authors show that the differences in degree of adoption of the features are related to the attitudes of non-Majorcan Spaniards towards (Majorcan) Catalan and the Majorcan ethnolinguistic group. Speakers with more positive attitudes had higher frequencies of nuclear configurations similar to those of Majorcan Catalan. In a similar fashion, it is argued in Romera & Elordieta (2019) and Elordieta & Romera (to appear) that the variety of Spanish spoken in the Basque Country presents final contours in yes/no interrogative utterances that resemble those of Basque, but with inter-speaker differences in frequency of occurrence of such contours. On the one hand, speakers that have more contact with Basque itself or with native speakers of Basque have higher percentages of Basque-like rising-falling circumflex contours. On the other hand, those speakers with more positive attitudes towards the Basque language and the Basque ethnolinguistic group also present higher frequencies of such contours. The two factors taken together (degree of contact and attitudes) were strong predictors of the variation. As a last example, Kozminska (2019) finds different intonational behaviors in English among native Polish speakers who moved to Great Britain to study and then work. Speakers who had a more Cosmopolitan view of life and were more oriented towards the English-speaking world showed higher percentages of use of final intonational contours in declarative utterances that were closer to native British English-like contours (the fall-rise). By comparison, speakers with a stronger Polish identity had lower frequencies of such final contours.

The goal of the conference “Intonation, language contact and social factors” is to gather researchers working on phonological issues of language contact and bilingualism, with a special focus on the interaction between social factors and intonation. The languages in contact may be of any family or area in the world.

Confirmed keynote speakers

• Dr Mary Baltazani

References

Alvord, S. (2006). Spanish intonation in contact: the case of Miami Cuban bilinguals. Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota.

Baltazani, M., Przedlacka, J., & Coleman, J. (2019a). Greek in contact: A historical-acoustic investigation of Asia Minor Greek intonational patterns. In I. Kappa & M. Tzakosta (eds), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, 49-58. Patras: University of Patras.

Baltazani, M., Przedlacka, J., & Coleman, J. (2019b). Intonation in contact: Asia Minor Greek and Turkish. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain & P. Warren (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2841-2845. Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

Colantoni, L., & Gurlekian, J. (2004). Convergence and intonation: Historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7(2), 107-119.

Congosto Martín, Y. (2019). Political vs. linguistic borders: The Spanish intonation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living on either side of the border. Spanish in Context, 16, 390-418.

Elordieta, G. (2003). The Spanish intonation of speakers of a Basque pitch-accent dialect. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 2, 67-95.

Elordieta, G., & Calleja, N. (2005). Microvariation in accentual alignment in Basque Spanish. Language and Speech, 48, 397-439.

Elordieta, G., & Irurtzun, A. (2016). Pitch accent tonal alignment in declarative sentences in the Spanish of the Basque Country: A study of language contact. In M. Armstrong, N. Henriksen, & M. M. Vanrell (Eds.), Intonational grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields, 25-44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Elordieta, G., & Romera, M. (to appear). The influence of social factors on the prosody of Spanish in contact with Basque. International Journal of Bilingualism.

Fernandez Planas, A. M., Roseano, P., Elvira-Garcia, W., Carrera Sabaté, J., & Román Montes de Oca, D. (2019). From a perceptual point of view, is there prosodic continuity between languages in contact? Spanish in Context, 16, 543-572.

Fernández Rei, E. (2019). Galician and Spanish in Galicia: Prosodies in contact. Spanish in Context, 16, 438-461.

Kozminska, K. (2019). Intonation, identity and contact-induced change among Polish-speaking migrants in the U.K. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(1), 29-53.

Lai, L.-F., & Gooden, S. (2018). Intonation in contact: Mandarin influence in Yami. In Proceedings of the 9^th^ International Conference on Speech Prosody, 952-956.

Masa, L., & Elordieta, G. (2017). Aproximación a la entonación de A fala. Estudos de Lingüística Galega, 9, 87-110.

Mennen, I. (2004). Bi-directional interference in the intonation of Dutch speakers of Greek. Journal of Phonetics, 32, 543–563.

Muntendam, A., & Torreira, F. (2016). Focus and prosody in Spanish and Quechua; Insights from an interactive task. In M. Armstrong, N. Henriksen, & M. M. Vanrell (Eds.), Intonational grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields, 69-89. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Muñiz-Cachón, C. (2019). Prosody: A feature of languages or a feature of speakers? Asturian and Castilian in the center of Asturias. Spanish in Context, 16, 462-474.

O’Rourke, E. (2005). Intonation and language contact: A case study of two varieties of Peruvian Spanish. Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

O’Rourke, E. (2012). The realization of contrastive focus in Peruvian Spanish intonation. Lingua, 122(5), 494–510.

Queen, R. (2012). Turkish-German bilinguals and their intonation: Triangulating evidence about contact induced language change. Language, 88(4), 791-816.

Robles-Puente, S. (2012). Two languages, two intonations? Statements and yes/no questions in Spanish and Basque. ASJU - International Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology, 46, 252-262.

Robles-Puente, S. (2019). Rhythmic variability in Spanish/English bilinguals in California. Spanish in Context, 16, 419-437.

Romera, L., Salcioli, V., Fernández-Planas, A. M., Carrera, J., & Román, D. (2008). The prosody of simple sentences in the Spanish of Barcelona, a Spanish-Catalan bilingual context. In L. Colantoni, & J. Steele (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology, 167-181. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Romera, M., & Elordieta, G. (2013). Prosodic accommodation in language contact: Spanish intonation in Majorca. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 221, 127-151.

Romera, M., & Elordieta, G. (2019). Las interrogativas absolutas circunflejas en el español del País Vasco y su correlación con actitudes lingüísticas. Paper presented at the I Congreso Internacional ALFALito: Dinámicas lingüísticas de las situaciones de contacto, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, October 28-30, 2019.

Simonet, M. (2008). Language contact in Majorca: An experimental sociophonetic approach. Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Simonet, M. (2010). A contrastive study of Catalan and Spanish declarative intonation: Focus on Majorcan dialects. Probus, 22, 117-148.

Simonet, M. (2011). Intonational convergence in language contact: Utterance-final contours in Catalan-Spanish bilinguals. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 41, 185-205.

Troncoso-Ruiz, A., & Elordieta, G. (2017). Prosodic accommodation and salience: the nuclear contours of Andalusian Spanish speakers in Asturias. Loquens, 4.

Uth, M. (2019). Traces of language contact in intonation: The case of Yucatecan Spanish. Spanish in Context, 16, 353-489.

van Rijswijk, R., & Muntendam, A. (2014). The prosody of focus in the Spanish of Quechua-Spanish bilinguals: A case study on noun phrases. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18, 614-632.