Sevillian Spanish /s + ptk/ clusters are often produced with gemination of the consonant following /s/ and postaspiration (/pasta/:[pahta]-->[pat:ha]) (Ruch and Peters, 2016). Spanish voiceless stops are unaspirated, but some argue that postaspirated stops are phonologizing in Seville (O'Neill, 2010; Gylfadottir, 2015). Acoustically, postaspiration is long VOT. Articulatorily, it is described as a laryngeal gesture moving across the stop, continuing past the release (Torreira, 2007). Previous work focuses only on /s + ptk/. This acoustic study examines /sC/-clusters with voiceless stops, voiced stops, and sonorants, extending our understanding of the mechanisms behind postaspiration. Seven Sevillians read paragraphs containing /sC/ and /C/ words (/kaspa/-/kapa/). All clusters show gemination. Compared to /ptk/, /s + ptk/ clusters have long postaspiration, resist intervocalic voicing, and result in higher pitch on the following vowel (a cue to contrastive aspiration in many languages, Dmitrieva et al., 2015). /s + bdg/ clusters have stronger constriction, higher COG, and less voicing than intervocalic (spirantized) /bdg/. /s + mnl/ clusters differ from /mnl/ only in gemination. Gestural overlap thus occurs in voiced and voiceless clusters, and appears to result from higher-level realignment as opposed to unintentional mistiming (Parrell, 2012). Postaspirated voiceless stops are unlikely to phonologize because the process occurs with both /s + bdg/ and /s + ptk/, giving different results.

Sevillian Spanish is undergoing a change from preaspiration to postaspiration in /s ptk/ sequences ([pahta] -> [patha]) (Ruch & Peters, 2016).  Some previous work suggests that postaspirated stops are phonologizing in Sevillian Spanish (O'Neill, 2009; Gylfadottir, 2015). In this paper, I argue that postaspirated stops are underlyingly clusters. Evidence for the cluster representation comes from two sources: sociolinguistically-conditioned variation and phonologically-conditioned alternations across word and morpheme boundaries. I then present the results of a perception experiment showing that Sevillian listeners perceive postaspiration and map it onto an underlying cluster. Listeners of another dialect (Mexican Spanish) do not perceive or interpret postaspiration. Finally, I outline an analysis in which postaspiration is the result of gradual coda reduction followed by metathesis. This kind of metathesis may be possible due, in part, to perceptual difficulties in perceiving aspiration.

This article presents a verbal-visual analysis of the meaning and theme of the word "tráfico," such as it appears on one of the covers of Época magazine. In order to do so, it takes into account the etymology and the historical changes of the meaning of the word in certain concrete contexts in which it circulated, so as to verify how its polysemy contributes, in conjunction with the cover visuality, to produce a certain impact on the reading audience. The analysis is based on Vološinov's theory of meaning and theme, and emphasizes the importance of the social and historical context in the study of ideological signs.

In languages that assign stress differently according to morphological structure, affixes often fall into different categories. In Brazilian Portuguese, normal suffix words have one stress (Base: [kaˈfε] 'coffee'; suffixed: [kafe-ˈtejɾa] 'coffee pot'). Special suffix words are claimed to have two stresses, one of which falls in the same location as in the independent base ([ka ˌfε-ˈzĩɲu] 'coffee-dim'). The special suffixes include diminutive -(z)inho, superlative -íssimo, and adverbial -mente. This paper reports on a production study showing that stress maintenance on the base of special suffix words is acoustically present through longer duration and marginally higher intensity, and through maintenance of vowel height for mid vowels. Phonologically, the special suffixes are often analyzed as attaching to an independent prosodic word base (e.g. Collischonn 1994;Moreno 1997;Vigário 2003;Guzzo 2018). I cast the analysis in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993): the phonological differences between special and normal suffixes are due to morphosyntactic differences. Under this analysis, differences between special and normal suffixes are principled rather than arbitrary. Morphological and prosodic structure are both necessary, and prosodic structure mediates between morphology and phonological processes.

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In this paper, we argue that metathesis, an underattested phonological operation, is best understood as gestural overlap. Based on two case studies (Sevillian Spanish and Uab Meto), we observe that metathesis is (i) implemented in a phonetically gradient way and (ii) invisible to other phonology. We use these observations to propose that phonology is bifurcated into two major strata: early phonology and late phonology. Early phonology uses atomic representations, whereas late phonology uses gestural representations. While early phonology feeds into late phonology, the output of late phonology is not accessible to early phonology. Under this division, metathesis is therefore strictly late phonology because it uses gestures as its core representational unit. As late phonology, metathesis is therefore expected to be invisible to (early) phonological operations in these languages.