Sobre la entonación de las interrogativas absolutas del español de Barcelona en función de su organización informativa y morfosintáctica

The aim of this work is to study the intonation of yes-no questions in Spanish of Barcelona, analysing the interface with informative and morphosyntactic structure. To this purpose, we present new data to describe this kind of utterances and we examine the state-of-the-art and controversial issues. Even if experimental phonetic and phonological research has paid particular attention to yes-no questions, there still exist some open problems. We use a transcription system which is closely linked to the phonetic realization of the intonation contour, running it in a semiautomatic mode by a program that provides a stylization algorithm and an annotation process. Our findings provide empirical evidence which shows that information structure and morphosyntactic level do affect prosodic realizations of utterances. We can definitely conclude that even if it presents various theoretical and methodological problems, the study of linguistic interfaces is very useful and it allows a deeper and a better description compared to the separated analysis of the same linguistic levels.