Pragmatic transfer through language contact: Chilean Spanish and Mapudungun intonational plateaus as mechanisms of extended focus La transferencia pragmática a través del contacto lingüístico: Las mesetas entonativas del castellano chileno y el mapudungun como mecanismo de extensión del foco discursivo

Notions that Mapudungun, an Amerindian language 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 have been more profound that 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 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.