Vocative Intonation in Language Contact: The Case of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Explain in more detail how prominence was determined. If judgments were done independently, provide agreement rate among all three raters and state what was done in examples when agreement was not complete.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English is fine. I only noticed one thing:

p.2, line 71: Catholics Kings > Catholic Monarchs

Author Response

Explain in more detail how prominence was determined. If judgments were done independently, provide agreement rate among all three raters and state what was done in examples when agreement was not complete.

The rating was made jointly by three of the authors (which is already stated in the paper). Agreement could be reached in all cases.

 

p.2, line 71: Catholics Kings > Catholic Monarchs

Changed accordingly.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors, 

I have carefully reviewed the article and thoroughly enjoyed reading your work. The exploration of the original language scenario and its relevance to modern theoretical approaches is commendable. I have identified a few minor suggestions that may further improve the (already) high quality of the article.

Line 96: You refer to BJS as a dying language. In this context, I would recommend using the term “a dying variety of Judeo-Spanish” for greater precision.

Line 134: When discussing changes in the prosodic system in a language contact situation, it would be beneficial to include more substantive references. Please consider incorporating additional references such as e.g. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) related to this point, rather than relying solely on Matras (2009) and Grünke (2022). Alternatively, you could specify that Grünke 2022 provides an overview (specific to the Spanish-speaking world?), if applicable.

Line 257: In References it is Vanrell et al. 2018, not 2017. Please correct.

Lines 325-327: In the passage where you mention the auditory analysis, it would be valuable to provide more information on such analysis.

Line 333: If I understand correctly, you also measured the last syllable. Please include this information in this part for clarity.

Line 366: It seems that the maximum F0 point (H) is not correctly placed in Figure 1. Please review and adjust its placement.

Line 484: It might be of interest to note that Czech, another Slavic language, also displays L% in “neutral vocatives” (Pešková 2023).

Line 541: Towards the end of the article, you introduce some new ideas. The observation of “the final vowel being split into two syllables” is very intriguing and it may be more suitable to relocate this information to the Results section. Providing some evidence to support this claim would be beneficial.

Lines 544-550: While discussing possible implications and future directions is essential, I recommend avoiding new claims at the end of the article. For the reader, the part does not seem to be so suitable. Instead, consider concluding with some further discussion within the framework of contact linguistics, for instance. Alternatively, you could explore the findings in relation to Ineke Mennen (2015), who demonstrates that L2 learners often face difficulties with what are known as the semantic dimensions (this appears to be relevant to your findings as well).

Line 717: Susann Fischer instead of Susann Susann (?)

Author Response

Line 96: You refer to BJS as a dying language. In this context, I would recommend using the term “a dying variety of Judeo-Spanish” for greater precision.

Changed accordingly.

 

Line 134: When discussing changes in the prosodic system in a language contact situation, it would be beneficial to include more substantive references. Please consider incorporating additional references such as e.g. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) related to this point, rather than relying solely on Matras (2009) and Grünke (2022). Alternatively, you could specify that Grünke 2022 provides an overview (specific to the Spanish-speaking world?), if applicable.

We included a reference to Gabriel/Kireva (2014) to complete the picture and also indicated the pages of the overview of studies involving Romance varieties in Grünke (2022). However, we did not refer to Thomason/Kaufmann (1988), because what they say about prosodic change due to contact is nominal. We really think Matras (2009) is the key reference in this context.

 

Line 257: In References it is Vanrell et al. 2018, not 2017. Please correct.

Done. 2018 is the correct year.

 

In the passage where you mention the auditory analysis, it would be valuable to provide more information on such analysis.

We added some more information.

 

Line 333: If I understand correctly, you also measured the last syllable. Please include this information in this part for clarity.

We added this information in in the following paragraph where we explain which acoustic measures were taken.

 

Line 366: It seems that the maximum F0 point (H) is not correctly placed in Figure 1. Please review and adjust its placement.

This was probably due to the fact that the graphs created by this Praat script represent a "smothed curve", with the turning points sometimes shifting slightly. However, we adjusted the placement and replaced the figure.

 

Line 484: It might be of interest to note that Czech, another Slavic language, also displays L% in “neutral vocatives” (Pešková 2023).

Thanks for pointing out this piece of information, which we added.

 

Line 541: Towards the end of the article, you introduce some new ideas. The observation of “the final vowel being split into two syllables” is very intriguing and it may be more suitable to relocate this information to the Results section. Providing some evidence to support this claim would be beneficial.

We'd prefer not to move this text passage to the results section, since there is only one (pretty clear) case and we hence do not have a strong claim about this issue. We are also a little sceptical about what evidence we could provide here. However, we mentioned this within the context of the enhancement of final syllables, which we now discuss much more extensively and with many new references to the literature.

 

Lines 544-550: While discussing possible implications and future directions is essential, I recommend avoiding new claims at the end of the article. For the reader, the part does not seem to be so suitable. Instead, consider concluding with some further discussion within the framework of contact linguistics, for instance. Alternatively, you could explore the findings in relation to Ineke Mennen (2015), who demonstrates that L2 learners often face difficulties with what are known as the semantic dimensions (this appears to be relevant to your findings as well).

We’ve added some more discussion of the results within the framework of contact linguistics, as well as a separate conclusion section, where we again summarize the findings in terms of contact linguistics. We abstrained from including Mennen’s model here, because Judeo-Spanish is not an L2 variety. In contrast, Bulgarian was an L2 for the first refugees coming from Spain, but nowadays Bulgarian is the dominant L1 of our bilinguals, who are not perceived as being different from monolingually raised speakers of BG (Andreeva et al. 2017).

 

Line 717: Susann Fischer instead of Susann Susann (?)

Thanks. We corrected this.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

See attached pdf file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

See PDF.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The changes look good.