The Intonational Expression ofIncredulity in Absolute Interrogatives in Buenos Aires Spanish

Earlier descriptions of interrogative intonation contours in many Peninsular Spanish dialects, such as Navarro Tomas (1944) and Quilis (1981), report two kinds of differences associated with the contrast between falling and rising boundary pitch movements (BPMs; known in Spanish as cadencia or tonema). One is the distinction between pronominal interrogatives (also known as partial questions or wh-questions) and absolute interrogatives (also known as non-pronominal interrogatives, polarity questions, or yes-no questions); whereas pronominal interrogatives have falling BPMs, absolute interrogatives typically have rising BPMs. The other difference is associated with certain pragmatic functions, such as the expression of an incredulous challenging of information added to the mutual belief space (often called presumptive interrogatives); whereas pragmatically-neutral informationseeking absolute interrogatives have rising BPMs, presumptives typically have falling BPMs. Studies of other dialects sometimes report other patterns for the BPMs of pragmatically-neutral information-seeking absolute interrogatives. For example, a falling BPM is reported for several Caribbean dialects, including Caracas (Sosa, 1991; Beckman et al., 2002) and Puerto Rico (Quilis, 1985; Sosa, 1991). The literature on Buenos Aires Spanish is mixed, with older work, such as Fontanella (1980) and Sosa (1991), reporting only rising BPMs, as in most Peninsular dialects, and more recent work reporting either only falling BPMs (Barjam, 2004), or both rising and falling BPMs, with a possible sociolinguistic relationship to the age and/or gender of the speaker (Lee, 2002, forthcoming). Given that absolute interrogatives can have the same syntax as declaratives (e.g., ? Maria viene manana? vs. Maria viene manana.), one might ask how these two utterance types are differentiated. Lee (forthcoming) reports differences in tone pattern for Buenos Aires Spanish (the interrogatives have a later fall, which she analyzes in terms of a HL phrase accent), in pitch range (the interrogatives have an expanded pitch range), and in downtrend (the interrogatives lack the steep downstep typical of sequences of accents in broad-focus declaratives). This paper addresses the obvious next question: if the contrast between rising and falling BPMs on interrogatives in Buenos Aires Spanish has become associated with socio-indexical functions such age or gender, how can speakers of this dialect express the difference that is associated with rising versus falling boundary pitch movements in earlier descriptions of many Peninsular Spanish dialects? More specifically, it examines the intonation patterns of absolute interrogatives that were elicited in the context of performed dialogues that should differentiate two pragmatic functions of interrogatives: a) pragmatically-neutral information-seeking questions, which can be referred to as ‘information questions’ (Bolinger 1989), or ‘QUERIES’ (Grice and Savino 1997) and b) presumptive questions expressing incredulity, also called ‘confirmation questions’ (Bolinger 1989), or ‘CHECKS’ (Grice and Savino 1997). The presuppositions and communicative function can vary in close relation to contextual factors. An interrogative can be uttered as an information-seeking question or as a question that expresses pragmatic meanings such as surprise and incredulity. A pragmatically-neutral information-seeking absolute interrogative (hereafter, information question) is defined as a type of question that is uttered to seek information. In this type of question, the person asking the question does not presume anything about the answer that he or she is going to get and has no expectation about whether the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’. That is, these are open questions in which the speaker really does not know what the correct answer is. A presumptive absolute