No abstract

This accessible textbook provides a clear introduction to the sounds of Spanish. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, it explains from scratch the fundamentals of phonetics (the study of speech sounds) and phonology (the study of sound systems) and describes in detail the phonetic and phonological characteristics of Spanish as it is spoken in both Spain and Latin America. Topics covered include consonants, vowels, acoustics, stress, syllables, intonation, and aspects of variation within Spanish. Clear comparisons are made between the sounds of Spanish and those of English, and students are encouraged to put theory into practice with over fifty graded exercises. Los sonidos del español will help students gain a solid understanding of the sound system of Spanish and will also be useful to scholars in phonetics and phonology. All the sounds described in this book are demonstrated in the online audio sound files which accompany this book.

This chapter offers an overview of intonational patterns in Spanish within the Autosegmental Metrical model. In all sections, both cross-dialectal patterns and differences among dialects are pointed out. In broad-focus statements, usually there is a fall throughout the syllable with nuclear accent. A rise and fall within this syllable conveys greater emphasis. In prenuclear accents, the general tendency is to have very late peaks, but this tendency is less prevalent in some varieties. Spanish dialects differ in their unmarked yes-no questions. One contour, found for instance in Madrid and Mexico City, has a low tone on the syllable with nuclear accent, followed by a final rise. The other main contour, typical of Caribbean and Canarian varieties, has a high plateau up to the last stressed syllable, where it falls. In wh-questions, there are less clear dialectal distinctions. Finally, there appears to be no unambiguous imperative intonation, even though imperatives are often segmentally identical to declaratives.

The Spanish voiced obstruents /b d g/ are traditionally described as having each two allophones: stop and fricative (approximant) in complementary distribution. Several researchers have noted that some Central American and Highland Colombian varieties deviate from the general allophonic distribution in showing a preference for stop realizations in all contexts, except for the intervocalic position. In this paper we report on a large-scale acoustic investigation of /b d g/ in postconsonantal (after a liquid, sibilant or glide) and postvocalic (after /a/) contexts in Costa Rica Spanish, establishing a comparison with the variety of Madrid, Spain, which we take as representative of a variety with the general pattern of allophony. Our study, based on a continuous measurement of intensity, confirms previous descriptions in that Costa Rica Spanish does indeed show a different pattern of allophony from that found in the Madrid variety. The analysis shows that in Costa Rica Spanish postconsonantal realizations of /b/ and /d/ are very different from postvocalic ones, with a clear separation in the degree of constriction between these two contexts. In Madrid, on the other hand, we find a continuum of constriction degrees, depending on the nature of the specific preceding segment, and without a clear separation between postvocalic and postconsonantal realizations. The question that naturally arises is that of the historical connection between these two patterns of allophony, for which we offer some speculation, based in historical parallels and comparison with other varieties.