UCLA

The present study proposes a model of intonational phonology for Miami Cuban (MC) Spanish within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework of phonology. Controlled and semi-spontaneous speech of 9 speakers was analyzed in order to establish the tonal inventory of this dialect, which contains three boundary tones, one prenuclear pitch accent, and three nuclear pitch accents. Results revealed that MC Spanish's tonal inventory most closely resembles that of Puerto Rican Spanish (Armstrong 2010), sharing a default prenuclear pitch accent and nuclear contours for broad and narrow focus, vocatives, echo questions, and exclamatives. Additionally, several sentence types had two possible boundary tone types, as seen in Alvord (2010) for yes/no questions. However, the boundary tone variation seen in the present study is not predicted solely by generation (as previously reported by Alvord 2010), but suggests a shift from the previous social indexing of boundary tones toward intergenerational variation, in which speakers from several generations produce both boundary tone types.