Luso-Hispanic Studies/ Linguistics

individual speaker variation are discussed. Section 2 provides a description of the methodology for data collection and Section 3 presents an analysis of the results. These results and the implications of the present study are discussed within the realm of Spanish peak alignment research in Section 4 and concluded in Section 5 within a framework for future research on intonation patterns among Spanish-K'ichee' bilinguals and Guatemalan Spanish in general.

This chapter presents a case of prosodic transfer among Spanish-K’ichee’ (Mayan) bilinguals from two communities in Guatemala: Nahualá and Cantel. Specifically, it analyzes the use of duration to mark contrastive focus in both Spanish and K’ichee’. The results of a production task demonstrate that there is a phonological restriction on the use of a longer duration to mark contrastive focus in Nahualá K’ichee’ but not in Cantel K’ichee’. The surface pattern of this restriction is transferred into the prosodic contrastive focus marking of the Spanish of several bilinguals from Nahualá. However, this prosodic transfer is more likely to occur among Nahualá females and in stress patterns that are present in both languages, i.e., word-final stress.

Language mixing is inevitable. As two languages come into contact, a word is borrowed from one language and put into another, when speakers feel they can better express themselves through the use of their neighbor's vocabulary. Soon many words are borrowed to the point that they become permanent in that language, expanding its lexicon with a diverse collection of new phraseology. This may even create a new language, such as Yiddish, which was formed by the amalgamation of Hebrew and German.

This paper analyzes the current inventory of the vowel systems across three dialects of K'ichee', a language that has been claimed to maintain the ten-vowel system with phonemic vowel length of Proto-Mayan in most dialects. It investigates the proposal that the /eː, e/ distinction is typically the first lost and the /aː, a/ is the last distinction maintained diachronically in Mayan languages because the former is the least frequent and the latter is the most. The results of a frequency count of spontaneous speech reveal that /aː/ is indeed the most frequent occurring long vowel and that the /eː, e/ contrast is the least frequent. Furthermore, the results of an acoustic analysis of speakers from the three K'ichee' dialects reveal three distinct vowel inventories: a ten-vowel system with phonemic vowel length, a nine-vowel system where the /eː, e/ contrast has been lost, and a six-vowel system where only the /aː, a/ contrast has been maintained; however, /a/ is also qualitatively different from /aː/ in all three dialects. It is proposed that these inventories may be due to the frequency of occurrence of the vowels and that the /aː, a/ quality difference may also contribute to its robustness against the length merger.

The present study analyses the syntax and prosody of contrastive focus in K’ichee’ according to the bilingual language dominance of the speakers. Results of a production task reveal that although speakers use all of the syntactic constructions mentioned in the literature, speakers that are less dominant in K’ichee’ use in situ constructions at a higher rate. The results of the acoustic analysis show that, in contrast to work on other Mayan languages, a focused constituent does not need to be moved to the preverbal, left-peripheral position in order to be prosodically prominent in K’ichee’. Furthermore, although all speakers prosodically mark a constituent for contrastive focus regardless of language dominance, the effects of language dominance on prosodic focus marking are gradient: speakers that are less dominant in K’ichee’ are more likely to mark contrastive focus to a greater prosodic degree than those that are more dominant in K’ichee’.

Available at: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/697585?journalCode=ijal

Although K'ichee' employs an absolute interrogative-marking particle, previous studies have claimed that it also marks absolute interrogatives prosodically via a rising boundary tone. This paper presents a categorical perception task of K'ichee' in which the boundary tone was manipulated in utterances with and without the absolute interrogative-marking particle and with utterances that contained a wh-word question. Results indicate that although utterances with wh-word questions were perceived as interrogatives regardless of the boundary tone manipulation, the intonation was a factor in the perception of absolute interrogatives. The participants in this study perceived utterances with rising boundary tones as questions and utterances with flat or falling boundary tones as statements, regardless of the presence of the absolute interrogative-marking particle. Thus, the absolute interrogative-marking particle in K'ichee' appears to be losing its meaning as speakers are relying solely on intonation. Although intense contact with Spanish could be a variable in the loss of meaning of the question-marking particle, it is proposed that this is could also be a natural diachronic process.

Este artículo presenta una investigación del estado actual del bilingüismo k'iche'-español y las actitudes hacia ello en dos municipios guatemaltecos: uno ubicado cerca de un centro urbano de habla hispana y otro más alejado. El análisis presentado aquí es el resultado de una encuesta y entrevistas con 162 bilingües de estos municipios y demuestra patrones distintos hacia el uso de cada lengua en cada municipio. Además, los resultados de las actitudes en ambos municipios revelan actitudes muy positivas hacia el k'iche' y la cultura maya que representa, aunque estas actitudes van acompañadas con un lamento general de la pérdida percibida de estos. Sin embargo, hay diferencias significativas en las actitudes hacia el español y la cultura hispanohablante en Guatemala: mientras que los bilingües del municipio más alejado tienen actitudes más negativas hacia estos, los bilingües del municipio urbano tienden a tener actitudes positivas hacia el español, pero principalmente por razones económicas. Así, a pesar de las diferencias entre estos municipios en cuanto al uso y las actitudes hacia el español, los bilingües de este estudio indican que la lengua k'iche' sigue siendo un aspecto muy importante de su identidad como mayas contemporáneos de Guatemala.

The point vowels /i, a, u/ serve to mark the extremes of the acoustic vowel space; however, previous experimental research on K'ichee' has shown that the acoustic location of point vowels varies according to the vowel inventory of the specific dialect of K'ichee'. The present study analyzes the acoustic vowel spaces of Guatemalan Spanish monolinguals and of Spanish-K'ichee' bilinguals from two K'ichee' dialects with different vowel inventories. The results of a production task reveal that the bilingual Spanish vowel spaces differ from those of monolinguals. Furthermore, although these bilinguals maintain cross-language differences in their mid vowels, their Spanish point vowels correspond in acoustic location to their K'ichee' point vowels, meaning they have similar acoustic vowel spaces in both languages.

Twenty-four simultaneous bilinguals of K'ichee' (Mayan) and Spanish produced broad focus declaratives in both languages. Target words, taken from the middle of syntactically parallel phrases, were analyzed prosodically in terms of both pitch register and pitch span, and compared across both languages according to language dominance in order to determine if these bilinguals have language-specific pitch ranges.

Results demonstrate that the participants produce lower L tones in Spanish than in K'ichee' regardless of language dominance. However, the speakers produce higher H tones in their non-dominant language than in their dominant language and K'ichee'-dominant bilinguals produce larger between-language differences in pitch span than Spanish-dominant bilinguals. It is argued that these findings may correspond to the frequency code, in that a higher pitch may be a manifestation of the bilinguals' uncertainty or lower level of confidence when speaking their less-dominant language.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006920952855

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions:
This study examines prosodic contrastive focus marking in the Spanish of 24 simultaneous K'ichee'-Spanish bilinguals via the following research questions: (a) How do K'ichee'-Spanish bilinguals prosodically mark contrastive focus in Spanish? (b) Is there evidence of K'ichee' influence in Spanish prosody and is this possible K'ichee' influence correlated with the language dominance of the bilinguals?

Design/Methodology/Approach:
Participants produced utterances in both broad and contrastive focus conditions via a question-answer task.

Data and Analysis:
Tonic syllables of 1,638 target words were analyzed according to Land H-tone alignment and the rise of the pitch contour. Data were analyzed via linear mixed-effects models according to pragmatic condition (categorical effect) and language dominance (continuous effect).

Findings/Conclusions:
Results indicate gradient effects of language dominance of possible K'ichee' influence. Spanish-dominant bilinguals tend to prosodically mark contrastive focus to a greater degree than K'ichee'-dominant bilinguals. It is proposed that this may be due to the different focus marking strategies between K'ichee' and Spanish. K'ichee' primarily marks contrastive focus syntactically whereas it is much more common in Spanish to only mark contrastive focus prosodically.

Originality:
This study employs a modified version of the question-answer task, which uses video clips to elicit the data in order to include participants with low literacy rates and control the elicitations. It also provides one of the first analyses of intonation in Guatemalan Spanish and the task and data allow for direct comparisons with the K'ichee' data produced by these same bilinguals (Baird, 2018).

Significance/Implications:
These results parallel those of similar studies: among bilinguals, the syntactic focus marking strategy of one language may affect the prosodic contrastive focus marking strategy of their other language. Additionally, the use of language dominance as a continuous variable expands our understanding of inter-speaker variation in such studies.

Research on Guatemalan Spanish has increasingly shown the effects of contact with Mayan languages. However, whereas most studies have focused on the structural outcomes of Spanish-Mayan contact, fewer studies have analyzed how native Guatemalans socially perceive these features and, by extension, those who employ them. This study presents an analysis of one contact feature of Guatemalan Spanish: the fortition of the voiceless labiodental fricative, or /f/ > [p]. Results of a matched guise of 116 native listeners of Guatemalan Spanish reveal that [p] guises index speakers as Maya and elicit more negative overt and covert attitudes than [f] guises. Furthermore, participants who self-identified as Maya were more likely to rate [p] guises as less prestigious than participants who did not identify as Maya, indicating that the Maya participants may display outgroup favoritism in order to disassociate themselves with the discrimination and racism that often accompanies their ethnic identity in Guatemala.

This study analyzes the social perceptions of the apocope of word-final segments in paroxytone words, e.g. [ꞌsiŋko] → [ꞌsiŋk] 'five', a phenomenon of Guatemalan Spanish that has been ascribed to contact with Mayan languages. As negative social stereotypes have often been associated with the indigenous Maya in Guatemala, a matched guise was administered to 116 native Guatemalans in order to determine if this particular linguistic phenomenon indexes negative attitudes as well. The results reveal the indexical fields elicited by apocopated forms, as listeners perceive guises with apocope as having lower-status occupations and wearing less-prestigious clothing than the guises without apocope.