A study of prosodic variation in Mirandese

Abstract

The lack of research on the prosody of Romance languages in general, and Mirandese in particular, underlines the emergence of the project which frames this study. Thanks to the development of new technologies, which includes appropriate computational tools for the collection and analysis of speech’s signal, at the end of 1999, the AMPER project emerged. This project is based on an idea by Michel Contini, originally presented in Bilbao in 1991 (Contini 1992). Taking advantage of the experience acquired by the AMPER POR team (AMPER project for the Portuguese language European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese), coordinated by the second author of this article, the idea of studying the prosody of the Mirandese language follows the same methodology as the AMPER project. Thus, in December 2015, after adapting the corpus and defining a work plan, the first of a series of oral corpora collections beginning the study of prosody of Mirandese language. The main objective of this study is to present some results obtained from the data collected in two representative points of the three diatopic varieties of Mirandese, based on the classification of José Leite de Vasconcelos which has been adopted by most researchers who have been studying Mirandese language. We have analysed the most peripherals points so, in future works, we can delimit the areas where prosody differs and compare these data with the referred classification of Mirandese varieties.