Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics

Lack of Syllable Duration as a Post-Lexical Acoustic Cue in Spanish in Contact with Maya

“…On the one hand, the situation of Yucatecan Spanish is analogous to the Nahualá case in that in both contact situations there is an indigenous contact language with phonemic vowel length and a Spanish contact variety that does not show any effects of post-lexical duration. However, contrary to what Baird (2017) reports for the female Nahualá speakers, the bilingual speakers of our experiment were balanced bilinguals, and as such, they were as highly proficient in Spanish as they were in Yucatec Maya, meaning that no effect could be attributed to a reduced knowledge of Spanish to begin with.…”

“…Importantly for the present purposes, Baird (2017) suggests that phonemic vowel le (the lack of) post-lexical duration are interrelated in Spanish-Maya contact. He investig groups of Spanish-K'ichee' (Maya) bilinguals in Guatemala, one in the community of Cante another one in Nahualá.…”

“…In principle, this difference should not affect the target syllable. Nevertheless, previous studies have reported that the indefinite article can receive accentual prominence instead of the word it complements (Muntendam and Torreira 2016). Consequently, all contrastive focus sentences with indefinite articles were further checked auditorily by the first author, a native speaker of (European) Spanish, to make sure that no such cases would be included in the analysis.…”

“…Keeping in mind Baird's (2017) argumentation about Nahualá K'ichee' and Gutiérrez- Bravo et al's (2019) work on the syntactic transfer of Yucatec Mayan focus fronting constructions into Yucatecan Spanish, the obvious question is if the lack of post-lexical duration in Yucatecan Spanish may be related to cross-linguistic influence from Yucatec Maya, and, if yes, how exactly this influence may have originated across the years. On the one hand, the situation of Yucatecan Spanish is Tables 2 and 4 and Figures 4-7 show that the mean duration of almost all stressed syllables is longer in contrastive than in broad focus.…”

“…"The cat with red boots ate a mouse, not the one with blue boots." (Zubizarreta 1999, p. 4230) of voiceless plosives (Lope Blanch 1987;Mediz Bolio 1951;Michnowicz and Carpenter 2013;Suárez Molina 1996), or glottalization (Lope Blanch 1987;Michnowicz and Kagan 2016;Suárez Molina 1996), and it is especially true for the peculiar intonation of the variety (see, e.g., Barrera Vásquez 1977;Mediz Bolio 1951;Michnowicz and Barnes 2013;Suárez Molina 1996):…”