Elision of Spanish Intervocalic /y/: Toward a Theoretical Account

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hispania. IntroductionPronunciation of Spanish intervocalic /y/1 is subject to considerable regional variation, ranging from a prepalatal affricate to a weakly articulated semivowel [i]. In those dialect regions where the latter pronunciation predominates, total effacement of certain instances of intervocalic /y/ is common, resulting in potential merger of minimal pairs such as sella '(s)he seals'/sea 'be' (subj., 3s.).2 In the same dialect zones, hypercorrect epenthesis of intervocalic /yl in popular speech is not infrequent: dzia > diya 'day.' Although these phenomena have been frequently commented, there are few detailed descriptions, and even fewer attempts at incorporating variable elision/epenthesis of /y/ within theories of Spanish phonology. The present study has a dual function: first, to offer a refinement of the observational data, and second, to suggest some tentative steps in the direction of characterizing Spanish dialectal variation in terms of phonological processes. It will be proposed that elision of /y/ results from the Obligatory Contour Principle, operating on an autosegmental tier defining front vowels and /y/. This claim in turn depends upon a model of phonological underspecification of Spanish vowels and glides. The remainder of the discussion proceeds as follows: Section 2 provides data on elision of /y/; Section 3 provides data on epenthesis of /y/; Section 4 discusses underspecification of Spanish vowels and semivowels; Section 5 describes elision of /yl in terms of underspecification and the Obliga-

The role of contextual and prosodic factors on consonant lenition and elision. The case of intervocalic [j] in Majorcan Catalan

“…The scenario for the elision of intervocalic [j] is not too different from the one just described. Thus, in the Romance languages, intervocalic [j] may be absorbed by (mid) high front vowels whether systematically (e.g., in American Spanish dialects, as in [kutio] cuchillo "knife", [estea] estrella "star"; Lipski, 1990Lipski, , 1994 or in specific lexical items derived from Latin presumably through the stages [] > [j] > [Ø] (Catalan [mst] mestre MAGISTRU "teacher", [rejn] reina REGINA "queen", [rumia] rumiar RUMIGARE "ruminate"). In American Spanish, [j] may not only drop next to a front vowel but also whenever one of the two flanking vowels is [a] (Lipski, 1990) Espinosa, 1930: 198-199); moreover, elision is prone to occur posttonically rather than pretonically when the triggering segment is a (mid) high front vowel and perhaps [a] and [o] as well (Espinosa, 1930, Henríquez Ureña, 1938.…”

Frequency and efficiency in Spanish proverbs

“…For example, in Spanish we find that grillo → ["gri.o]; después → [de. "pu > es]; and in English we find that memory → ["mEm.ôi]; and information → ["In.foU] (Lipski 1990, Brown 2008, Bybee 2002b, Mahowald et al 2013. Such a phenomenon is encompassed in Zipf's law, which states that there is a negative correlation between a word's frequency and its length in any given corpus of written language or naturally produced speech (Zipf 1936(Zipf , 1949.…”

Guía PRESEEA de estudio del yeísmo

“…Su relevancia y dinamismo ha generado una bibliografía ingente a ambos lados del Atlántico convirtiendo el proceso en uno de los rasgos clásicos para el estudio de la variación. Algunos de los hispanistas más renombrados profundizaron sobre el mismo en trabajos que hoy son clásicos, entre los que cabe citar los de Amado Alonso (1951), Rafael Lapesa (1957), Emilio Alarcos (1968, Guitarte (1955), Malmberg (1947), Canfield (1962);o, más recientemente, Parodi, (1977) Granda (1982), Montes (1995, Fontanella de Weinberg (1987 y 1992), Lipski (1990Lipski ( y 1994, Moreno de Alba (1988), Wagner y Rosas (2003), Godenzzi (2004, Klee y Caravedo (2005), Salcedo Salinas (2005), Moreno Fernández (2004, Klee (2009), Colantoni y Hualde (2013), Rohena Madrazo (2013), Rost Bagudanch (2013 o Borzi (2022), entre muchos otros.…”