Prosodic and functional analysis of the rising tone interrogation in three types of corpora on the Spanish spoken in Cuba

Abstract

Abstract: This paper seeks to illustrate the systematic use of the final rising intonation in the Spanish spoken in Cuba. A study of the tonal structure and the pragmatic functions of this type of interrogatives in three different corpora is carried out. The attained results lead to deduce that in the Spanish spoken in Cuba, two interrogative rising tone patterns are produced, interacting with a variety of syntactic structures and used to express different pragmatic functions, according to the context. The features of its tonal structure show the prevalence of the nuclear stress L+H* along with it’s L+H*, L+>H*, L+>¡H* variants; besides the L*+H stress, frequently used in the oral academic discourse.