ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Intonational Aspects of Imperatives in Mexican Spanish

Alina Lausecker, Annika Brehm, Ingo Feldhausen

This paper sheds new light on the intonation of imperatives in Mexican Spanish. Results from a pro- duction experiment based on scripted speech show that imperative sentences have two different nuclear configurations depending on the position of the imperative verb (VI): (i) (L+)H* L% with VI in sentence- final position, and (ii) L* L% with VI in non-final position. The pitch accent on VI in non-final position is characterized by a late peak (L+>H*). However, if the sentence is uttered with some sort of emphasis, the nuclear configuration in the non-final context can also be rising. While these results partly confirm claims made concerning the nuclear configuration in De-la-Mota et al. (2010), they contradict the findings in Willis (2002), who attested strong pitch accent variation on VI.