A veces lloro mis lágrimas. A multivariate approach to expressive speech acts in Mexican Spanish

Abstract

This paper discusses some prosodic properties of 720 cases of expressive utterances in 36 speakers from the Corpus sociolingüístico de la ciudad de México (Martín Butragueño & Lastra, 2011, 2012 and 2015). The starting hypothesis is that the prosodic expressiveness is divided into two major types – encouragement and discouragement – described through several restrictions within the framework of the Optimality Theory. In particular, the phonetic pragmatic characteristics and the social correlates of different variants of nuclear accents in expressive utterances are examined through a multivariate analysis; besides, the pre-aligned nature of tonal peaks is observed in many of the examples, thus confirming in general terms the validity of the initial hypothesis.