Preliminary study on the prosody of simulated conflict interactions: the case of Galician Spanish urban speakers

In the extensive research works on the prosodic variation among speakers of Galician Spanish (GS) residing in urban areas, the prevailing outcome is that their melodic patterns exhibit a greater influence from the Spanish Castilian variant than from Galician language. Our preliminary study endeavours to empirically assess this assertion through the application of Melodic Analysis of Speech, Praat software, and multimodal discourse analysis framework, particularly in the context of simulated conflict situations. The overarching objectives of this research are, therefore, to identify the prosodic resources utilized by urban GS speakers in simulated conflict situations and elucidate the pragmatic functions of these resources from the perspective of diatopic variation. The pivotal findings and conclusions derived from this study encompass the following: (1) Urban GS occasional neofalantes employ three prosodic constituents (f0 values, intensity, and duration) as resources to introduce the semantic-pragmatic implicit meaning of their indirect speech acts, i.e., as contextualization cues activating different categories of conversational implicature; (2) The hybrid intonational patterns and their distinctive features can be attributed to diatopic linguistic variation within GS.