CONTRIBUTION OF YES-NO QUESTIONS AND STATEMENTS TO DIALECTOMETRIC CLASSIFICATIONS

This paper aims to determine whether questions are more useful than declaratives to assess dialectal intonational differences in Spanish. To this end, we analysed Pearson's correlation of the intonational contours used to establish dialectal classifications and we checked to see which modality was more responsible for the difference in survey points. The analysis uses two experimental corpora: one contains 12 Spanish speakers from 7 survey points, the other one contains 12 speakers from 6 survey points in the Romania. Results show that for the Spanish varieties analyzed, questions are a better differentiator than declaratives (r = 0.4641 vs. r = 0.7982), whereas for other varieties statements can be more distinctive.