Prosodic correlates of the different values of the conjunction pero 'but'

In recent times an area of study has been developed that is related to the way in which we understand and produce grammatical structures and units, including independent and subordinate clauses. The analysis of prosody, one of the variables most involved in the understanding and mapping of structures (Frazier et al. 2006), is crucial for understanding the extent to which the prosody-syntax-pragmatic interface determines the cognitive processing of the relations between clauses. In the present paper, different syntactic-pragmatic values were identified that are associated with the use of the conjunction pero 'but': either restrictive-adversative or pre-concessive, in the same way as in Italian and Russian (Mazzoleni 2016; Biagini & Mazzoleni 2017, 2019). The main objective of this research is to identify the prosodic correlates associated with these values. To this end, first a small corpus of Rioplatense Spanish, consisting of film audios, was analysed. Next, a larger corpus, made up of elicited utterances from Spanish speakers from the Rio de la Plata area was collected. In both corpora, the following acoustic parameters were taken into account: duration (in milliseconds), speed (phonemes per second), inflection (difference of initial and final FO) of both constituents and the presence or absence of pauses. The initial hypothesis of this study is the existence of a correlation between the prosodic clues and the different values of the coordinating conjunction. The results show that the utterances that contain a restrictive-adversative conjunction pero have a falling intonation contour, while those that incorporate a pre-concessive pero have a rising or continuous intonation contour. Additional parameters associated with adversative utterances are the greater presence and longer duration of pauses before the conjunction, lower speed of the first constituent and longer duration in the production of pero.