The Search for Phonological Targets in the Tonal Space: H1 scaling and alignment in five sentence-types in Peninsular Spanish*

The quest for phonological and linguistic units in the F0 continuum has been and still is one of the main research questions in intonation studies. In recent years there has been accumulating evidence that LH points in the tonal space behave as phonological targets. Indeed, H peaks of both nuclear and prenuclear pitch accents are produced with an amazing degree of stability in scaling and alignment across languages (see Arvaniti et al. 2001. Liberman and Pierrehumbert 1984, Prieto et al. 1995, 1996, Silverman and Pierrehumbert 1990, and recent work by Xu 1999, 2002). Nowadays, a central assumption of the standard autosegmental-metrical model (and of most work on intonation) is that pitch range variation is paralinguistic, that is, it expresses exclusively differences in emphasis or prominence. This assumption relies on a version of the socalled Free Gradient Hypothesis (Ladd 1996). It is indeed clear that one of the most common effects of gradually expanding the pitch range of a given pitch accent is the pragmatic reinforcement of the utterance, that is, an increase in the degree of speaker’s involvement in the speech act. Recently, though, some work within the autosegmental model has revealed that pitch range variation does not always correspond to phonetically gradient changes indicating overall emphasis/prominence (due to the speaker’s implication in the speech act) but rather it can trigger categorical distinctions in meaning (Hirschberg & Ward 1992, Ward & Hirschberg 1985, Ladd 1994, 1996). Thus, steps have been taken towards the phonologization of the pitch range category such as the inclusion of a [raised peak] feature (Ladd 1994, 1996) or an upstepped accent in the tonal inventory (Beckman et al. 2002).