Acceso usuarios
It is widely accepted that the phonetic realization of intonation contours over short utterances triggers a gestural reorganization of the tones involved. According to the way intonation contours are realized in these sequences, Grønnum (1991) and Ladd (1996) have observed two strategies, compression (or complete realization of the melodic form) and truncation (or elision of the initial/final part of the contour). This article describes the so-called "neutral" contours in Central Catalan (specifically, declarative, interrogative and imperative sentence-types) and examines the process of temporal realization of these tunes over short utterances (monosyllabic phrases and utterances containing just one stressed syllable). Catalan is a strongly compressing language, a tendency shown by all tunes except for the interrogative one. The article shows how the apparent cases of "gestural reorganization" can be explained by a left-to-right association of the pitch accents involved in the phonological tune with the metrically strong positions available in the sentence. Thus, each contour adopts two different shapes according to the number of tonic syllables it contains. Pierrehumbert's model of tonal representation can therefore obtain in a straightforward way the resulting contours, showing its superiority over other representational models.
