Linguistic factors conditioning glottal constriction in Nicaraguan Spanish
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Whitney Chappell [1]
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[1] University of Texas at San Antonio
University of Texas at San Antonio
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Italian journal of linguistics, ISSN 1120-2726, Vol. 27, Nº. 2, 2015, págs. 1-42
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This paper provides the first quantitative exploration of the linguistic factors conditioning glottal constriction in Nicaraguan Spanish, an allophone of word-final, intervocalic /s/, e.g. [ma.'al.to] for más alto ‘higher’. To date the variant has only been mentioned in passing in dialectal surveys (Quesada Pacheco 1996; Rosales Solís 2010) or described as a contact feature in other dialects of Spanish, i.e. Philipino (Lipski 2000), Yucatan (Lope Blanch 1987: 108-124), Argentinian/Paraguayan (Sanicky 1989; Thon 1989), and Puerto Rican Spanish (Valentín-Márquez 2006). However, the Spanish spoken in Managua is not in contact with any other languages, and I argue that glottal constriction in this dialect is a phonetically motivated, language-internal phenomenon. After a statistical analysis of 3,701 tokens from 36 Managuan participants, I conclude that glottal constriction serves to 1)strengthen prosodically strong positions due to its likelihood before word-initial, stressed vowels and 2) avoid postlexical hiatus, being more likely after longer words with high rates of /s/ deletion
