Entonación de los enunciados aseverativos en el español de la Ciudad de México entre los años 1960 y 1970

This paper describes the prosodic features —with emphasis on the nuclear pitch accent— of the statements documented in the corpus “Norma lingüística culta” and “Habla popular de la Ciudad de México” (Lope Blanch, 1971, 1976). The prosodic description is carried out with the Autosegmental Metrical model and the analysis of sociolinguistic factors. Regarding the nuclear pitch accent L+H *, the statistical analysis showed two significant factors: narrow focus statements and the low level of education. The nuclear accent H * is more prevalent in men and the low level of education. By contrast we observed that the group of adults, the higher education and the broad focus statements favor the descending contour, which has lesser relation with vernacular patterns in Central Mexican Spanish.