Boundary tones in non-native speech: The transfer of pragmatic strategies from L1 Swedish into L2 Spanish
-
Berit Aronsson
Berit Aronsson is a teacher of Spanish at Umeå University. She is currently preparing her doctoral dissertation in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching with special interest in the acquisition of prosodic patterns in Spanish as foreign language.
and
Lars Fant
Lars Fant is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stockholm University. His research encompasses semantics (information structure), pragmatics (pragmatic particles and politeness), interactional linguistics (dialogue analysis of various communicative activity types), cross-cultural studies (stereotyping) and second language acquisition and use. He is currently member of the steering committee of the research programme ‘High-level proficiency in second language use’, funded by the Tercentenary Foundation of the Bank of Sweden.
Abstract
The pragmatic functions of pitch at tone unit boundaries are studied in L2 Spanish spoken by Swedish learners, as compared to L1 Swedish and L1 Spanish. The data are recordings of a task in which the subjects – 10 learners of Spanish and 13 native controls – make a restaurant booking on the phone in Spanish, and the Swedish subjects also perform this task in their L1.
The tone unit boundary rises and falls produced have been analyzed with special focus on rises and their accompanying vowel duration patterns. The turn-regulating functions of signaling turn-continuation vs. transition-relevance are contrasted with intersubjectivity-regulating signals, namely (non-)prompts for information and (non-)prompts for interpersonal acceptance. Since open-ended yes/no-questions are signaled by rises in Spanish, though not in Swedish, and since declaratives carrying a positive politeness value tend to end in rises (the “tail flick”) in Swedish, though not in Spanish, various types of potential negative transfer could be predicted for Swedish learners' L2 Spanish.
It is shown that L1 Spanish speakers consistently use moderate rises for turn-keeping and high rises for information-seeking, and that this pattern has no equivalence in the L2 Spanish data. Conversely, rises in L2 Spanish frequently occur where L1 Spanish speakers prefer falls. These rises, interpreted as “tail flicks,” also occur in L1 Swedish, but they are far more frequent in the L2 Spanish data. Thus, clear transfer patterns are found, which are further reinforced by insecurity effects due to L2 speaking.
About the authors
Berit Aronsson is a teacher of Spanish at Umeå University. She is currently preparing her doctoral dissertation in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching with special interest in the acquisition of prosodic patterns in Spanish as foreign language.
Lars Fant is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stockholm University. His research encompasses semantics (information structure), pragmatics (pragmatic particles and politeness), interactional linguistics (dialogue analysis of various communicative activity types), cross-cultural studies (stereotyping) and second language acquisition and use. He is currently member of the steering committee of the research programme ‘High-level proficiency in second language use’, funded by the Tercentenary Foundation of the Bank of Sweden.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Boundary tones in non-native speech: The transfer of pragmatic strategies from L1 Swedish into L2 Spanish
- Expressing disagreement in English as a lingua franca: Whose pragmatic rules?
- The elasticity of I think: Stretching its pragmatic functions
- Pragmatics and intercultural mediation in intercultural language learning
- Forum
- The semantics and pragmatics of the CHI + NON-FOOD NP construction: Comments on Xiong (2012)
- Book Reviews
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Corrigendum
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Boundary tones in non-native speech: The transfer of pragmatic strategies from L1 Swedish into L2 Spanish
- Expressing disagreement in English as a lingua franca: Whose pragmatic rules?
- The elasticity of I think: Stretching its pragmatic functions
- Pragmatics and intercultural mediation in intercultural language learning
- Forum
- The semantics and pragmatics of the CHI + NON-FOOD NP construction: Comments on Xiong (2012)
- Book Reviews
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Corrigendum
