Prosodic phrasing in Porteño Spanish

This paper deals with prosodic phrasing in Porteño Spanish, the urban vernacular of Buenos Aires. Concerning its prosody, Porteño is often described as more closely resembling Italian than other Spanish dialects. While recent work largely focuses on Italian’ features in the domain of pitch accents, the present study shows that phrasing patterns also tend to follow the Italian model. Based on recordings made with 25 speakers from Buenos Aires, we concentrate on broad-focus SVO declaratives, taking different phrasing conditions such as syntactic and prosodic complexity into account. Two main aspects are considered: first, the presence or absence of prosodic breaks, and second, their surface realization, including tonal shape and durational aspects.