Intonational variation in Minorcan Catalan: Towards a prosodic change?

•The paper presents one of the few known cases of intonational variation not due to language contact.•The origin of intonational variation is probably the overlap in pragmatic meanings of two contours.•A large number of speakers (158) were recorded.•The corpus contains 1380 yes-no questions collected by means of DCT. Sound variation and change at the suprasegmental level have been the object of a limited number of studies. Among them, the cases of intonational variation and change that cannot be attributed to language contact are very rare. This paper describes a case of intonational variation (which could possibly be the first stage of an ongoing intonational change) that is not due to language contact and that is observed on Minorca, a Catalan-speaking island in the Western Mediterranean. 158 speakers were recorded in 4 locations (two urban areas, a small town and a village). Speakers were male and female speakers belonging to two age groups (teenagers and adults). The corpus contains 1380 information-seeking yes-no questions collected by means of a Discourse Completion Task. Results show that while adult speakers seem to use only the traditional contour (as documented in several previous studies), teenagers in urban areas mostly use a yes-no question contour that differs from the tune used by adults. Teenage speakers in rural areas, on the other hand, still largely use the traditional yes-no question contour. The innovative contour has not been borrowed by other languages or dialects in contact with Minorcan Catalan, but was already in use in Minorcan Catalan with a different pragmatic function.