The phoneme /s/ in word-final position in Standard Spanish has a high functional load. It is used to distinguish between the singular and plural of nouns and adjectives and between the second and third-person singular forms of verbs in all tenses except the preterite. Some examples of morphological distinctions based on presence or absence of the suffix /-s/ are: casa 'house' vs. casas 'houses', rojo vs. rojos 'red' (singular vs. plural), and come 'he eats' vs. comes 'you eat'.The phonetic treatment of the /s/ phoneme varies, however, and /s/ is not consistently retained as a sibilant in word-final position in many dialects. In a large number of Spanish-speaking areas, casa and casas may both appear as [käsa], with no apparent number marker in the plural. Likewise, come and comes may both appear as [kome], with no apparent person marker.It has long been a question among Hispanic linguists whether those morphological distinctions carried by the suffix /-s/ in the standard language are maintained in areas where /s/ appears optionally as zero, and if so, how?One frequently repeated hypothesis is that in the speech of these areas some compensatory phonemic change takes place in the vowel immediately preceding the zero allophone of /s/ in word-final position. This change involves the phonemicization of the open vs. closed quality of Spanish vowels and yields, according to different opinions, seven, eight, or even ten Spanish vowel phonemes from the original five.The Spanish vowels are often described phonetically with regard to the relative closeness or openness of their allophones, for example [e] vs. [$] and [o] vs. [ ]. These allophones, it is often said, show regular allophonic alternation in certain dialects in specific environments: in these dialects, closed vowels tend to appear in open syllables, and open vowels tend to appear in closed syllables. The final vowel in comes, then, should be open in comparison with the final vowel in come. Brought to you by | University of Queensland -UQ Library Authenticated Download Date | 6/16/15 6:54 AM
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