Acoustic analysis of tonicity of relative words in indefinite free relative constructions

Relatives in indefinite free relatives (No tiene con quien hablar ‘He doesn’t haveanybody to talk to’) are sometimes considered stressed and sometimes asunstressed. Our aim is to analize the nature of the accent in this kind of relativewords in order to determine, by measuring the acoustic correlates of stress(intensity, duration and frequency), if these relative words are stressed orunstressed. We have carried out an acoustic and statistical analysis of the data withPraat and SPSS programs. Our results shows, in the first place, that interrogativesand relatives are not so different in tonicity, as the only parameter which allows todifferenciate between them is duration, and just in the case of who and when. In thesecond place, the intensity values of the relatives that appear in indefinite freerelatives are similar to the values stressed controls (interrogatives), specially thepronoun que, but this kind of data is very complex and shows a lot of variation.