Prosody and discourse structure in Buenos Aires Spanish

In previous work, we examined the role of some prosodic features in structuring spoken discourse. In this paper, we explore monologue in political discourse, and attempt to link these prosodic cues to the speaker’s argumentative goals. The prosodic analysis is carried out in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework applied to Buenos Aires Spanish. The pragmatic analysis follows Relevance Theory. Tonal configurations guide the hearers to those parts of the discourse the speaker wants the audience to consider highly relevant.


Introduction
In previous work (LABASTÍA, 2011;LABASTÍA AND DABROWSKI, 2011;DABROWSKI AND LABASTÍA, 2013), we analysed the role of intonation in Buenos Aires Spanish in structuring spoken discourse in terms of a contrast between suspensive or rising nuclear tones, on the one hand, and falling nuclear tones, on the other.We interpreted this contrast in procedural terms, as processing instructions to indicate to the hearer how to derive the speaker's intended cognitive effects with WKH OHDVW SURFHVVLQJ HIIRUW 6SHFL¿FDOO\ ZH SURSRVHG WKDW VXVSHQVLYH DQG ULVLQJ QXFOHDU FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV VLJQDO to the hearer that they should process the information as background, that is, as context in which forthcoming foreground information will achieve the speaker's LQWHQGHG HIIHFWV ,Q FRQWUDVW IDOOLQJ QXFOHDU FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV mark the information as foreground, that is, as relevant in LWV RZQ ULJKW 6XVSHQVLYH DQG ULVLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV VXJJHVW to the hearer that he should hold off deriving cognitive HIIHFWV XQWLO D IDOOLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ LV KHDUG ,QVWHDG D IDOOLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ HQFRXUDJHV WKH KHDUHU WR SURFHVV the accumulated intonational phrases with suspensive or ULVLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV WRJHWKHU ZLWK WKH RQHV ZLWK IDOOLQJ intonation.The audience can now derive richer cognitive effects than they would have done, had they processed each intonational phrase separately.To sum up, nuclear tone choice organises spoken discourse in processing units (PUs), indicating which information is to be treated as background, and which as foreground (HOUSE, 1990), and the joint processing of background and foreground 1 lead to rich cognitive effects.
The overall pitch range, or tonal envelope, also contributes to signalling the limits of PUs.The beginning is marked by a an upwards pitch resetting, WKHQ SLWFK ÀXFWXDWHV EHWZHHQ D PLGWRKLJK OHYHO DQG it reaches the speaker's baseline at the end.In other 1 It should be noted that background does not necessarily mean given information.Background information is information which contributes only indirectly to relevance.Nor should foreground be interpreted as new information.Foreground information is information that is relevant in its own right by having contextual effects (SPERBER and WILSON, 1995, p. 217).
In previous work, we analysed TV and radio interviews.On this occasion, we focus on monologue: we analyse a piece of political discourse and attempt to link nuclear tone choice and declination to the speaker's argumentative goals.Gutiérrez (1997) analyses some features of political discourse which are worth considering IRU WKH DQDO\VLV RI RXU GDWD LW LV VWUDWHJLF VLQFH LW GH¿QHV goals, means and opponents; it has performative features, because it produces a speech act and adopts a position; LW LV HVVHQWLDOO\ SROHPLF DV LW GH¿QHV DQ DGYHUVDU\ DQG LW counters real or anticipated arguments by that adversary; it is argumentative, insomuch as it presents a thesis and arguments supporting it.
7KH SDSHU LV RUJDQLVHG DV IROORZV ¿UVW ZH LQWURGXFH the theoretical framework in which we carry out our research.Next, we describe the data and methodology, and we analyse extracts from the monologue.We link the prosodic choices with the speaker's argumentative goals at different stages in the discourse.Finally, we draw some conclusions about the study of discourse and the study of intonation from a pragmatic point a view.

Theoretical framework
The prosodic analysis of the data is carried out in the Autosegmental-Metrical (A-M) framework of intonational phonology (PIERREHUMBERT, 1980;LADD, 2008).Intonational contours are interpreted in terms of high (H) and low (L) tonal targets, and make up two types of units: pitch accents (T*), associated with prominent syllables, and boundary tones (T%) at the edge of intonational phrases (IPs). 3An application of the A-M framework to the analysis of intonation in Buenos Aires 2 As House points out, processing units are very often coterminous with the grammatical sentence.In fact, all sentence boundaries may correspond to processing unit boundaries, but not all processing unit boundaries may coincide with sentence boundaries (HOUSE, 1990, p. 50).
3 Phrase accents (T-) mark the boundaries of intermediate phrases (BECKMAN and PIERREHUMBERT, 1986).There isn't agreement as to whether Spanish has this phrasing level below the intonational phrase.The data in this paper is segmented into intonational phrases.Spanish, using the Sp-ToBI transcription system 4 , can be found in Gabriel et al (2010). 5Particularly important for our analysis is the nuclear tone, the last pitch accent LQ WKH ,3 ZKRVH ORFDWLRQ DQG FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ DIIHFWV WKH pragmatic value of the whole intonational phrase.
The pragmatic analysis follows Relevance Theory (RT) (SPERBER and WILSON, 1995;WILSON and SPERBER, 2004).Information is relevant when it connects with other (background) information the hearer has in a productive way, yielding cognitive effects, or improvements in the hearer's representation of the world.These effects are mainly of three types: contextual implications (conclusions), and revisions: strengthening or abandonment of background information.Relevance can be assessed in terms of the impact of new information in the context of already existing information.The more cognitive effects information triggers, the greater the relevance.But processing information involves cognitive effort of perception, memory and inference.The greater the effort, the less relevant the information will appear to be; the lesser the effort, the more relevant it will appear to be.Greater effort will be acceptable only when it leads to greater cognitive gain.Languages contribute two types of input to the process of pragmatic interpretation: conceptual and procedural.Procedural devices (discourse connectives, pronouns, determiners, etc.) (WILSON AND SPERBER, 1993; LEONETTI AND ESCANDELL-VIDAL, 2004) encode processing instructions which reduce cognitive effort by guiding the hearer to the speaker's intended interpretation.Intonation has also been analysed as a procedural device with a pragmatic import (WILSON AND WHARTON, 2006;HOUSE, 2006;ESCANDELL-VIDAL, 2011a).
4 Sp-ToBI stands for Tone and Break Indices in Spanish.ToBI is the transcription system which implements the tenets of the A-M approach to intonation in different languages. 5GABRIEL et al (2010)   include a mid-pitch boundary tone, M%, in which the voice neither falls to a low pitch nor rises to a high pitch.This boundary tone plays a crucial role in our analysis of spontaneous spoken discourse.

Data and methodology
The data consists in a press conference given by the Argentinian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Héctor Marcos Timerman, at the United Nations (UN) in New York on February 12 th , 2012.The 22-minute press conference video, available on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2C_tx3OyqY, was turned into a 22,050 Hz, 16-ELW PRQR DXGLR ¿OH ,W ZDV WUDQVFULEHG DXGLWRULO\ VHSDUDWLQJ the text into intonation phrases and marking the nuclear WRQH FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV 3LWFK GHFOLQDWLRQ WKURXJKRXW WRQH units was also taken into account, especially low pitch and upward reset, to segment speech into PUs.The authors transcribed the recording separately, and then checked their transcriptions for reliability.Then key instances of QXFOHDU WRQH FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV ZHUH DQDO\VHG XVLQJ 35$$7 (BOERSMA and WEENICK, 2010), to corroborate auditory impressions.Table 1 shows the pitch accent and boundary tone contrasts.Arrows are used to show pitch direction for those readers who are not familiar with the A-M framework and Sp-

Analysis of the data Prosody and discourse organisation
If we concentrate on the opening section of the press conference, we will notice that the speaker's voice ÀXFWXDWHV EHWZHHQ DSSUR[LPDWHO\ +] VW 100 and 100 Hz (0.03 st 100 ).Taking into account the pitch height of WKH QXFOHDU WRQH FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV LQ WKH LQWRQDWLRQDO SKUDVHV ZH ORFDWH WKH ¿UVW FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ DW +] VW 100 ).7KH QXFOHDU WRQH FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV WKHQ ÀXFWDWH EHWZHHQ approximately 180 Hz (10.14 st 100 ) and 140 Hz (6.60 st 100 ) (occasionally reaching 223 Hz, or 13.92 st 100 , on the prenuclear pitch accent on "no" in the phrase "al no uso"), and at the end of the section, the voice reaches 97 Hz (-0.57st 100 RQ WKH QXFOHDU V\OODEOH RI D ORZIDOOLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ (Figure 1).This section is devoted to explaining the purpose of coming to the UN: the Argentinean search for a peaceful settlement based on dialogue and diplomacy.The nuclear WRQH FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ LQ WKH IROORZLQJ LQWRQDWLRQDO SKUDVH LV located at 191 Hz (11.18 st 100 ) and a new downward trend sets in.This new section is used for a different purpose: to thank those (Latin American) diplomatic representatives present at the conference for their support of Argentina's bid to keep peace in the Southern Atlantic area and to regain soverignty of the 'Malvinas' Islands.We thus conclude WKDW WKH ¿UVW VHFWLRQ FRQVWLWXWHV D 38 D GHFOLQDWLRQ GRPDLQ employed to signal topic cohesion.This opening section consists mainly of rising-VXVSHQVLYH QXFOHDU WRQH FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV /+ 0 H[DPSOH >D@ ¿JXUH EHORZ 7KH VSHDNHU LV FUHDWLQJ the context /background to introduce the most relevant information, and suggesting that the hearer should wait until that information is uttered to process the accumulated material as a whole (capital letters identify the nuclear syllable): [1a] 7KH XVH RI WKHVH IDOOLQJ QXFOHDU FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV LQ these intonational phrases is in keeping with the speaker's goals: to get Great Britain to commit itself to not using weapons.In fact, the whole of the press conference will be about the U.K.'s increased introduction of sophisticated, high-tech weaponry in the area of the 'Malvinas' archipelago.The relevance of this part of the message is further emphasized by the fact that, when mentioning the "non-use" of weapons, Timerman expands his pitch range, and the two prominent syllables in the intonational phrase reach the highest pitch in the section:  When the speaker shows a new slide with the different weapons and devices the United Kingdom has introduced, he explains to the audience what is displayed in it, and elaborates on the impact of the introduction of that weapon or device in the area, and the danger it involves for all the neighbouring countries.Then he sums up the main points of that part of the presentation.

Two organisational patterns in PUs
It is interesting to notice that the nuclear tone FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV KDYH D GLIIHUHQW GLVWULEXWLRQ DW GLIIHUHQW points in the presentation and discussion of each slide, and thus background-foreground relations vary in different PUs.The distribution seems to be cut basically to two patterns.One pattern appears at the presentation stage of each slide, when the speaker provides factual information -often reading from notes which he uses to guide his presentation -and when he sums up the main points in that slide, before passing on to the next.The other surfaces after the presentation, when the speaker assesses the consequences of the facts he has just stated for the countries in the area.(background) with respect to which the information in the low-falling intonational phrase at the very end operates as a signal to process the series of intonational phrases in the PU, thus achieving the desired cognitive effects:  In the second pattern, the nuclear tone FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV DUH GLVWULEXWHG LQ D GLIIHUHQW ZD\ 7KH speaker does not wait until the end of the processing units to present the most relevant information and to instruct the hearer to process the whole.He uses highfalling or rising-falling tones in the middle of the PU to indicate that the information he is presenting is crucial to draw the intended conclusions.The hearer is to assess the impact of these tone units immediately, and not wait until the end of the PU.This can be considered to be one of the possible standard ways of intoning a list in Spanish.However, in [5b] he immediately afterwards points to the different military bases Great Britain has in the area.He wants to show how powerful the British military forces are in the area, and the extent to which they control access to the oceans, VHD DQG DLU WUDI¿F +H PHQWLRQV HDFK ORFDWLRQ ZLWK D IDOOLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ (DFK EDVH LV UHOHYDQW LQ LWVHOI DQG adds up to the list, as if the speaker were saying "not only X but also Y and Z and…", creating a completely different effect: Great Britain appears to be the single most powerful force, and poses a real, immediate threat to the countries in the region, whose diplomatic representatives are attending the press conference. [5a] It is in this discourse pattern that another phenonenon shows up: deaccenting in the intonational SKUDVH 0RVW QXFOHDU WRQH FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV LQ 6SDQLVK RFFXU at the end of the IP, on the last content word.Displacing the nuclear accent to an earlier position in the IP is a marked option: the deaccented chunk after the nuclear accent is somehow background information.Besides, deaccenting may be related to a contrastive or emphatic meaning (ZUBIZARRETA, 1998).In the following example [6], Timerman claims to know that Great Britain has sent nuclear weapons to the South Atlantic, and they refuse to admit that they have done so.In his speech, he anticipates a question the audience may ask: Then he goes on to relate another occasion when it leaked out that UK troops had nearly had an accident transferring nuclear weapons from one ship to another.Deaccenting, then, appears as a characteristic of this second prosodic pattern, where highly relevant information, marked by the use of a falling tonal

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It is worth pointing out that the three features discussed above -increased range, double stress and deaccenting -do not occur in any of the PUs with the

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We consider that these two prosodic patterns RI RUJDQL]DWLRQ RI 38V UHÀHFW WKH VSHDNHU ¶V VWUDWHJLHV in pursuit of different communicative goals at different stages in the discourse.These goals can be linked to different types of argumentation in this type of discourse.
It is this aspect that we turn to in the next section.

Discussion
7KH ¿UVW SDWWHUQ GLVFXVVHG LQ WKH SUHYLRXV VHFWLRQ D VHTXHQFH RI QRQIDOOLQJ QXFOHDU FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV ZKLFK HQGV LQ D ORZIDOOLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ XWWHUHG RQ D declination domain, that is within a single PU, is perhaps the easiest way to present information to facilitate processing.The information in the non-falling nuclear FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV SURYLGHV D FRQWH[W LQ ZKLFK WR SURFHVV WKH most relevant information, marked with falling intonation at the end.As Sperber and Wilson (1995: 203) express it, "it is natural for given information to come before new... as this in some way facilitates comprehension."It is more natural for the background to come before the foreground in the same way that it is easier to communicate a piece of complex information step by step.This prosodic pattern is used by our speaker in order to present 'factual' information, or at least information which is meant to be taken as such.At the beginning of each slide, when Mr. Timerman introduces a new topic, he describes the slide, and presents details about the item in question.The PUs are coextensive with the sentence, simple, compound or complex.The information is expressed in present tense and indicative mood, and is not modalized in any other way.No doubt, the speaker intends his audience to take this information as objective and true to life.These sections qualify as expository discourse.This prosodic pattern also tends to appear in the concluding part of each topic, where the speaker also seems to appear as objective and unbiased.
The second prosodic pattern discussed above, ZKHUH IDOOLQJ WRQDO FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV RFFXU HDUOLHU LQ 38V and where foreground may precede background, reveals a different aspect of political discourse.The objective information provided in the introductory section of each topic, which was processed at that point as foreground, has become the background against which new information can be processed (SPERBER AND WILSON, 1995: 118).On the basis of that background, the speaker can now achieve another goal, which is characteristic of political discourse.He can engage in polemic, refuting claims by his adversary, the United Kingdom, either real or possible.Falling intonation is used to highlight those aspects of the polemic which he ZDQWV KLV DXGLHQFH WR UHÀHFW RQ 7KHVH DVSHFWV DUH WKH ones which are meant to lead to rich cognitive effects in the minds of the members of his audience.They concern the security of all the countries in the area, of which they are the diplomatic representatives.The security of these countries is supposed to be endangered by the mere presence of cutting-edge, high-tech weapons introduced by the United Kingdom into the 'Malvinas' Islands.
Foreign minister Timerman concludes the press conference by accusing the United Kingdom of using the right of the inhabitants of the islands to selfdetermination in order to establish a powerful military base in the area in the service of its strategic interests, and insists on Argentina's decision to strive for sovereignty over the islands by peaceful means.Finally, he urges the U.K. to obey the resolutions of the UN to discuss soverignty and stop the military escalation.Interestingly, he uses the more objective prosodic pattern which we have characterised as typical of expository discourse in this concluding section.Clearly, his ultimate purpose has also been not only to present counter-arguments against the U.K., but also to muster the support of Latin American countries by showing them that they, too, may be affected by the increasing 'militarisation' of the 'Malvinas' Islands, whilst appearing to be fair and objective in the end.
To sum up, we propose that prosody is used to RUJDQL]H WKLV W\SH RI GLVFRXUVH LQWR XQLWV ZKLFK UHÀHFW WKH speaker's varying strategic goals as his speech progresses.It enables him to signal which bits are to be treated as expository discourse, and present objective, irrefutable information, and which bits are to be treated as polemic with respect to the contrary opinions of an opponent.

Conclusions
In this paper we have tried to show the way intonation contributes to the interpretation of a piece of political discourse in Buenos Aires Spanish: how the speaker organises speech as processing units through declination, and how he signals background and foreground by means of contrasting nuclear tone FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV 7KH DQDO\VLV RI SURVRG\ LQ RXU GDWD reveals two different but complementary aspects of political discourse: it is both expository and polemic.
It is interesting to point out that the nuclear tone FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV IRXQG LQ WKLV SLHFH DUH WKH VDPH DV WKH RQHV found in the other type of discourse we have analysed, interviews and, we dare say, in everyday conversation.
As we pointed out in previous work (DABROWSKI AND LABASTÍA, 2013), the instruction to assess relevance or to postpone assessing it seems to EH HQFRGHG QRW LQ WKH ZKROH QXFOHDU FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ EXW in the boundary tone: L% operates as a signal to evaluate the relevance immediately, whereas M% and H% (the ¿QDO SDUW RI VXVSHQVLYH DQG ULVLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQV VXJJHVW SRVWSRQLQJ LW XQWLO DQ / LV IRXQG $ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQDO analysis needs to be complemented by a levels analysis (PIERREHUMBERT AND HIRSCHBERG, 1990), and it is also necessary to identify the meaning of the nuclear tones independently of that of boundary tones.We are FRQ¿GHQW WKDW WKH SURFHGXUDO YLHZ SURSRVHG E\ 57 FDQ help us to achieve that aim, too.
Needless to say, a more complete prosodic analysis of spoken data would need to include other aspects, such as segmentation into prosodic units at different levels (intermediate phrases and intonational phrases), pauses, duration and tempo variations.Once again, we trust that the inferential framework provided by RT offers useful tools to make progress in this area (ESCANDELL-VIDAL, 2011a, b).

Fig. 1 :
Fig. 1: Waveform, spectrogram and F0 trace of the end of the RSHQLQJ VHFWLRQ 7KH 35$$7 JUDSK VKRZV WKH SLWFK ÀXFWXDWLRQV ending in a very low pitch, and thus marking the end of the PU.
[1b´] / al NO ќUso / L+H* H+L* L% 223 127 Hz Throughout the conference, Foreign Affairs Minister Timerman shows different slides with information about Great Britain's 'militarisation' of the 'Malvinas' area: a map of Britain's military bases in the Southern Atlantic area, cutting-edge submarines, warships, warplanes and missiles, and different military LQVWDOODWLRQV VXFK DV D VKRRWLQJ UDQJH DLU¿HOGV DQG communications networks.He organises his speech as PUs on the basis of declination.These PUs are composed of background intonational phrases (with a suspensive RU ULVLQJIDOOLQJULVLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ DQG IRUHJURXQG SKUDVHV ZLWK IDOOLQJULVLQJIDOOLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ DQG WKH\ DOO HQG RQ D ORZSLWFKHG IDOOLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ / / ¿JXUH EHORZ 7KHQ SLWFK LV UHVHW DW WKH EHJLQQLQJ RI the following intonational phrase, and a new declination domain starts.

Fig. 3 :
Fig.3: Waveform, spectrogram and F0 trace of example [2b] above.The graph shows the sequence of rising-suspensive tones ending in a low-falling tone, pronounced as a declination domain or PU.

Fig. 4 :
Fig. 4: Waveform, spectrogram and F0 trace of example [4a] above.The graph shows the sequence of rising-falling tones ending in a low-falling tone, pronounced in a wider pitch range and as a declination domain or PU.
In the PUs in examples [4a] and [4b] below, Timerman shows a photograph of a cuttingedge naval vessel, a destroyer, which poses a serious danger to the South Atlantic area.The speaker uses the ULVLQJIDOOLQJ FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ WR VLJQDO WKH KLJK UHOHYDQFH of the information he is conveying, and does not wait XQWLO WKH HQG RI WKH 38 WR GR WKLV 7KLV FRQ¿JXUDWLRQ LV accompanied by an increase in pitch range, which makes /ha multipliCAdo por њќCUAtro/Gran BreTAña dice que NO está intenTANdo militariњїZAR L+H*+L L% L+H* M% 280 Hz (17.87 st100) 208 Hz (12.70 st100) has increased it fourfold Great Britain claims not to be trying to 'militarize' / el ATLÁNtico ќSUR / pero HA multipliCAdo por њќCUAtro / su poder naќVAL //