Transfer of intonation and bilingualism: the case of San Antonio, Texas

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the intonation of the Spanish spoken in San Antonio, Texas. The analysis is focused on neutral declarative and interrogative sentences drawn from a semi-spontaneous corpus obtained from North American native speakers who speak Spanish (heritage speakers). The first hypothesis is that the Spanish intonation in San Antonio has a great influence of Mexican due to its geographical location and the Mexican population residing therein. The results show similarities with the Mexican intonation, as marking the strong end tonal rise of interrogative sentences, but also differences that might be caused by the influence of English language.