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Interword phenomena in a dialect of Spanish
Abstract
Traditional as well as generative and autosegmental treatments of the topic of interword vowel behavior, suggest that hiatus-reducing processes, gliding or deletion, are conditioned and/or constrained by factors not only phonological, but prosodic and syntactic as well. This study on the informal speech of six carsqueno informants, distributed for gender and socioeconomic class, provides a large data base for the systematic analysis of vowel behavior in the interword context, retention, gliding or deletion with concomitant syllable reduction. A matrix of variables was recorded for each occurrence of vowels in contact and included phonological parameters, such as segment, stress, syllable structure, and prosodic and syntactic factors as well, such as grammatical category, phrase membership, and syntactic relationships. Rates of gliding and deletion are significant in the sample, accounting for an overall rate of syllable reduction of more than 50%. Data resulting from a comparison of vowel behavior with respect to each of the variables recorded indicate that factors involved in deletion and gliding are primarily phonological in nature. It is shown that deletion and gliding occur within a restructured syllable, and can be explained in terms of a universal representational constraint and a language-specific filter.
Subject Area
Language|Linguistics
Recommended Citation
Ortiz, Judith Miller, "Interword phenomena in a dialect of Spanish" (1988). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8906318.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8906318