Prosody

For some ChcE researchers and many lay people, prosody is the most salient feature of ChcE. For empirical linguists, it remains the most elusive. Some ChcE speakers readily employ strongly Spanish-like patterns at one moment, and utterly Germanic patterns at other times, while others exhibit a far more limited range at either end of the continuum. This aspect of phonology continues to bother ChcE researchers, and may need to wait for even greater ease-of-use advances in acoustic research technology. We want to reiterate that prosody is as mercurial in everyday speech, as it is prone to reification by the public.

Fought (2003) observes that the ChcE prosody system remains poorly understood. All we have are a few accumulated observations about word-stress patterns, intonation and syllabification. She centers her own review (2003: 70–80) on Santa Ana’s comment that ChcE “has a syllable timed quality to it” (1991: 139). Both Fought and Santa Ana are quick to note that ChcE exhibits the features of English stress timing (namely, lengthening and peripheralization of stressed vowels), but a syllable-timed quality remains at the root of the ChcE dialect. Fought concludes that ChcE is “intermediate in some ways” to other strongly stress-timed English dialects and the syllable-timed Spanish language. We turn to our list of selected ChcE prosodic features.