Variazione intonativa nell’asse diatopico: un tipo prosodico interrogativo in varietà italiane e spagnole

The prosody of interrogative utterances displays high degrees of intra- and interlinguistic variability. Yet there are less investigated interrogative types, verbless questions that work as generic requests and new topic selectors (¿Y el niño?, “And [what about] the child?”). This paper aims to pursue an intonational investigation of this type of questions in two Romance languages, Italian and Spanish. The study employs dialogic speech collected in 18 regional varieties (9 per language) to observe diatopic variation. The examined questions are consistently realized in both languages with a flat contour in the pretonic region and a rise starting from the nuclear syllable that continues to the end of the utterance and reaches wide span values. The results allow the intonational description of Romance varieties to be enriched with a special interrogative type, in which the expected inter-variety intonational variation is largely limited, inhibited by the need to express the illocutionary force.