Intonational variation in Minorcan Catalan: Towards a prosodic change?

Sound variation and change at the suprasegmental level have been the object of a limited number of studies. Among them, the cases of intonational variation and change that cannot be attributed to language contact are very rare. This paper describes a case of intonational variation (which could possibly be the first stage of an ongoing intonational change) that is not due to language contact and that is observed on Minorca, a Catalan-speaking island in the Western Mediterranean. 158 speakers were recorded in 4 locations (two urban areas, a small town and a village). Speakers were male and female speakers belonging to two age groups (teenagers and adults). The corpus contains 1380 information-seeking yes-no questions collected by means of a Discourse Completion Task. Results show that while adult speakers seem to use only the traditional contour (as documented in several previous studies), teenagers in urban areas mostly use a yes-no question contour that differs from the tune used by adults. Teenage speakers in rural areas, on the other hand, still largely use the traditional yes-no question contour. The innovative contour has not been borrowed by other languages or dialects in contact with Minorcan Catalan, but was already in use in Minorcan Catalan with a different pragmatic function.

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