Relevance and attribution in the intonation of Gran Canaria Spanish interrogatives

An insightful account of the mechanisms which underlie the association of prosodic patterns with pragmatic meanings is absent in most descriptions of the prosody of interrogative utterances in Spanish. The approach in Escandell-Vidal (1998) for European Peninsular Spanish responds by appealing to the linguistic distinction neutral/marked for interrogatives, together with the concepts relevance and attribution as used in Relevance Theory ( Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995). Our present study, analysing further data from Gran Canaria Spanish interrogatives (based on Cabrera-Abreu and Vizcaíno-Ortega, 2010) in the light of Relevance Theory, reveals that such a linguistic distinction requires an explicit statement as to whether it applies prosodically (marked/unmarked tunes) or pragmatically (neutral/non-neutral meanings). In addition, the restrictive behaviour proposed for attribution (it correlates with marked intonation patterns only, and its type is tightly bound to a single intonation pattern) must be relaxed in order to accommodate the cases of the unmarked intonation tune, and of a single marked tune charged with two different attribution types. The resulting framework enables us to understand better the nature of interrogative meanings and tunes, together with their actual mappings; to predict potential tune-meaning associations; and to exclude ill-formed tune-meaning connections.

► Rise-falls in Gran Canaria questions enjoy a wider distribution than rises or falls.
► The unmarked interrogative contour in Gran Canaria Spanish may carry information about attribution.
► Attribution type is not maximally constrained by prosody in Gran Canaria interrogatives.