Intonational Patterns in the Last Generation of Native Judeo-Spanish Speakers Born in Turkey: A Preliminary Study

To summarize, in this paper we have analyzed representative intonational contours in the recorded speech of three JS speakers from Turkey. We have considered several intonational functions: final statements, continuing statements, emphatic statements and interrogatives. In neutral statements we have noticed that the displacement of the accentual peak of rising accents is relatively rare compared to many varieties of monolingual Peninsular and Latin American Spanish. To indicate continuation, besides a contour with a fall onto the final stressed syllable followed by a rise, we have identified two other more complex contours. Each of these two contours is frequent in the speech of one of the speakers, but is not employed by either of the two speakers. Interestingly, one of these contours resembles a circumflex contour found in Mexican Spanish. Another remarkable feature, when compared to other Spanish varieties, is the frequent use of non-sentence final main or nuclear accent. All pronominal questions in the recordings that we have analyzed have a falling contour. The few examples of yes-no questions that we have found have either a circumflex contour or a rise.