FONETICA O FONOLOGIA POR DONDE DEBE EMPEZAR LA DESCRIPCION DE LA ENTONACION ESPANOLA (original) (raw)

As is well known, phonetics and phonological description includes both the study of the segments and the suprasegmentals: my contribution will be limited to the scope of suprasegmental elements, more precisely the intonation. One of the first problems we face in dealing with the description of the intonation of a language, in our case of Spanish intonation, is to be able to differentiate the phonological than phonetic, the contingent of the essential, the variable of the constant... It is not easy to tell with a certain intonation fact, what's standard, systematic tool of language, and that individual or casual and therefore not necessarily consistent. In the first case we are considering a fact of intonational phonology, and the second one of intonational phonetics. Thus, since the first scientific studies of intonation (mainly along the second half of the twentieth century) has been considering a methodical doubt: What should be the prospect that substantiates the description of intonation, the phonetic-inductive, or maybe the phonological-deductive? Despite everything, when we use the language we use curves or melodic patterns that fully meet their inherent communicative role, that is, its functional role. In this respect, we will review some of the approaches described in intonation more widespread, with the intention to illustrate the arguments for or against one and another perspective; we advocate the need to start from a functional perspective, adequate to differentiate the inherent heterogeneity in intonation. This perspective inevitably phonetic-inductive base, rests on the distinction between an axis of linguistic relations (intonational, to be exact) syntagmatic and paradigmatic: on them is projected functional mixture of intonation, understood as a cluster of resources (mostly gradual in nature), whose description (phonetics and / or phonological) faces necessarily multiple challenges.