[Resumen extraído de la fuente original]

Olivenza Spanish (OLI-SPA) and Olivenza Portuguese (OLI-PORT), spoken in Olivenza (Extremadura), provide remarkable examples of Spanish-Portuguese contact. They are said to be influenced by one another due to the existence of Spanish‐Portuguese bilingualism in this area until the middle of the 20th century (Matias, 2001; Sánchez Fernández, 1997). This study investigates the intonation and the speech rhythm of OLI-SPA, spoken by monolingual speakers, and of OLI-PORT, spoken by the ‘last’ Olivenza’s bilingual speakers (all older than 60 years). Its goal is to examine if and to what extent prosodic features that are typical of Portuguese and Spanish, respectively, show up in OLI-SPA and OLI-PORT. It is hypothesized that the prosody of both varieties is crucially influenced by the contact language (Portuguese or Spanish). In order to detect the traces of the long‐lasting contact, OLI-SPA and OLI-PORT are compared with another Portuguese variety: the Portuguese spoken in Évora (Alentejo), which, in turn, is not influenced by Spanish.
Regarding speech rhythm, it was shown that Standard Portuguese (STA-PORT) has mixed rhythm exhibiting great durational variability of consonantal intervals that places it in the stress-timed class, but variability and proportion of vocalic intervals that locates it in the syllable-timed class (Frota & Vigário, 2001). Thus, it is hypothesized that both OLI-SPA and OLI-PORT have syllable-timed rhythm, like Castilian Spanish (CAST-SPA) (see Benet et al., 2012 for CAST-SPA). Intonational differences between CAST-SPA and STA-PORT concern, e.g.: 1. The pitch accent distribution in declaratives (stressed syllables between the first and last one of the IP tend to be accentless in STA-PORT, in contrast to CAST-SPA) (Vigário & Frota, 2004); 2. The tonal realization of the nuclear contour in broad focus statements (L* L% in CAST-SPA vs. H+L* L% in STA-PORT); 3. The realization of nuclear contours in neutral yes-no questions (L* HH% in CAST-SPA vs. H+L* LH% in STA-PORT); 4. The realization of nuclear contours in neutral wh-questions (L* L% or L* HH% in CASTSPA vs. H+L* L% or H+L* LH% in STA-PORT) (see Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2010 for CAST-SPA and Vigário & Frota, 2004 for STA-PORT); 5. The prosodic phrasing patterns in simple SVO declaratives ((S)(VO) in CAST-SPA vs. (SVO) in STA-PORT) (D’Imperio et al., 2005); and among others.
Preliminary results on OLI-SPA prosody have shown that OLI-SPA has a syllable-timed rhythm. Interestingly, vowel reduction was attested in unstressed syllables in OLI-SPA. Regarding the intonational differences between CAST-SPA and STA-PORT presented here, it was found out that: 1. Only 25% of the IP-internal stressed syllables were desaccented in the OLI-SPA data; 2. Broad focus statements were produced with a L* L% nuclear contour; 3. The most frequent nuclear contours in neutral yes-no questions in OLI-SPA are L* HH% (47.5%) and H+L* HL% (or H+L* L%) (37.5%); 4. The most common nuclear contours in neutral wh-questions in OLI-SPA are H+L* L% (55.5%) and L* HH% (28%). 5. The predominant prosodic pattern in OLI-SPA is (SVO) (occurring in 70% of the cases).
These findings can be interpreted as follows: First, OLI-SPA seems to be influenced by Portuguese in exhibiting vowel reduction and the (SVO) prosodic phrasing. Second, it appears to have generated both prosodic features typical of Spanish and of Portuguese (see the realization of broad focus statements, neutral yes-no questions, and neutral wh-questions) which can be interpreted as result of convergence between the intonational systems of Spanish and Portuguese. Nevertheless, the current study is in progress. Thus, a further step is to provide the analysis of the intonation and speech rhythm of Olivenza Portuguese and Évora Portuguese.