Edited by Rajiv Rao
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 28] 2020
► pp. 293–324
Notions that Mapudungun, a polysynthetic agglutinating isolate spoken in modern-day Chile, has had any linguistic influence on Chilean Spanish outside of lexical loanwords have met stiff resistance (e.g., Alonso, 1953); however, recent studies (e.g., Sadowsky, 2013) suggest that Mapudungun’s influence on Chilean Spanish may be more profound than previously asserted. The current study examines a unique intonational “plateau” pattern documented in Rogers (2013). Similar patterns occur in Mapudungun and the data demonstrate that Mapudungun intonational plateaus and Chilean Spanish intonational plateaus behave very similarly at different prosodic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels. This study proposes that the plateau patterns in both languages are a mechanism of focus extension, and that Mapudungun introduced this unique pragmatic device into Chilean Spanish intonational phonology.