More on the imperative intonation. Data from Mexican Spanish

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to analyze the “imperative” intonation in Mexican Spanish, in the context of directive speech acts, constituted by a series of sub-components: advocations, preparations, central sub-acts (commands or requests), repairs, and justifications. It seems better to speak of a volitional intonation or a directive intonation. The hypothesis is that there is a relative prosodic harmony among the different components of the speech act, while every component has specific features. The article reviews previous works, presents the methodology, and analyzes data from seven different Mexican cities. The discussion considers the observations from an optimality theory point of view. Variability among components of the act and among examples is recognized, even though there is enough order through the data.

Keywords: imperative intonation; volitional prosody; commands and requests; optimality and prosody; Mexican Spanish.