The Interaction of Linguistic and Contextual Number Markers in Andalusian Spanish ∗

Ranson, Diana L.

doi:10.2307/343932

Cited by 3 publications

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“…In the context of the combined results of Carlson 2012, Defior, Alegría, Titos, and Martos 2008, O'Neill 2005, and Ranson 1993, which effectively rule out contrastive phonetic compensation for [s] lenition in WAS, the results of the current study suggest that the semantic relevance of /s/ as a plural marker must be quite low in modern Spanish.…”

Section: List Ofsupporting

confidence: 50%

“…The identifying criteria in Table 9 are used on all the DET+N phrases in each corpus (including those with ∅ determiner). The comparison works because we know that Castilian speakers reliably produce [s], while WAS speakers rarely do, and never in patterned ways (Ranson 1993). If there is lexical or morpho-syntactic compensation, it should present itself as a difference in the frequency between the dialects, of structurally ambiguous nouns or determiner phrases.…”

Section: The Study: Comparing Was and Castilianmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both dialects use the same writing system, so the WAS transcribers wrote "s" on any nouns and determiners that they understood as plural. However, As Ranson 1993 notes, only a fraction of the written "s" sounds would have been produced in the WAS corpus (1.5% in Ranson 1993), and they would not be produced in a patterned way.…”

Section: How Do Listeners Decode Plurality Without [S]?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The assumption in the majority of previous studies, with Ranson 1993 as a notable exception, is that [s] lenition dialects must have differences from non-lenition dialects that allow them to signal the information previously carried by [s] in an alternative way.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantifying the Functional Consequences of Spanish [s] Lenition

Ryan

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In this thesis, a new methodology is proposed for investigating Spanish [s] lenition (sound weakening or loss) via morphological analysis instead of phonetics. Word-final [s] is a morphological plural marker in Castilian Spanish, but is rarely produced in Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS). It is often asserted in the literature that the loss of [s] in WAS requires plurality to be expressed via alternative means. The results of this study rule out lexical and morpho-syntactic compensation for [s] lenition in WAS in several previously untested domains, and imply that there is no functional motivation in Modern Spanish driving a need for compensation for word-final [s] lenition on nouns or determiners. This investigation is built on a predictable calculation of the environments in which the loss of [s] may result in derived singular/plural homophony in WAS nouns. This is used to quantify potential semantic ambiguity. A frequency comparison of 27,366 WAS and Castilian nouns, across 60 specific Determiner + Noun phrase environments, finds no significant differences between the dialects in the type or token frequencies of numerically ambiguous nouns, nor in 98.7% of the tested phrase environments. When taken in context with studies excluding phonetic compensation in WAS, the current results suggest that the low semantic relevance of word-final [s] in Modern Spanish is a potentially far-reaching explanation for the variable manifestations of [s] lenition experienced in Spanish dialects across the world. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to Derek, Tommy, and Annie for all the love, support, and patience while I've been in school. I am deeply grateful to (and for) all of you. To my Mom, and all my extended family and friends, I could not have done this without you. Thank you for being my village. Thanks to my first Spanish linguistics professor, Dr. Máximo Torreblanca of UC Davis, who sparked my love of Spanish into a broader fascination with linguistic structure, and also to my last Spanish linguistics professor, Dr. Juan Sempere of SJSU, who brought me full-circle back to Spanish phonology twenty-five years later, and helped get this thesis off the ground in 2015. Heartfelt thanks to everyone on the 4 th floor of Clark Hall at SJSU, for the perpetually open doors, the willingness to help, or sometimes just to listen, and for being such outstanding human beings. Particular thanks to Drs.

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Section: List Ofsupporting

confidence: 50%

Section: The Study: Comparing Was and Castilianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: How Do Listeners Decode Plurality Without [S]?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantifying the Functional Consequences of Spanish [s] Lenition

Ryan

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A community-based test of a linguistic hypothesis

Cameron

1996

Lang. Soc.

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The Functional Compensation Hypothesis (Hochberg 1986a,b) interprets frequent expression of pronominal subjects as compensation for frequent deletion of agreement marking on finite verbs in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). Specifically, this applies to 2sg. tti where variably deleted word-final -s marks agreement. If the hypothesis is correct, finite verbs with agreement deleted in speech should co-occur more frequently with pronominal subjects than finite verbs with agreement intact. Likewise, social dialects which frequently delete agreement should show higher rates of pronominal expression than social dialects which less frequently delete agreement. These auxiliary hypotheses are tested across a socially stratified sample of 62 speakers from San Juan. Functional compensation does show stylistic and social patterning in the category of Specific tii, not in that of Non-specific tii. However, Non-specific tii is the key to frequency differences between -s-deleting PRS and -s-conserving Madrid; hence the Functional Compensation Hypothesis should be discarded.

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Lexically specific accumulation in memory of word and segment speech rates

Brown

Raymond

Brown

et al. 2021

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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Variability abounds in speech. According to usage-based accounts, lexical representations reflect phonetic variants of words resulting from contextual conditioning. Because faster speech contexts promote durational shortening of words and segments, words that occur more often in fast speech may be more reduced than words commonly used in slow speech, independent of the target’s contextual speech rate. To test this, linear mixed-effects models including a word form’s ratio of conditioning by fast speech contexts (FRCRATE) are used to predict the duration of Spanish /s/ and words containing /s/ in a corpus of spoken Spanish. Results show that words’ cumulative exposure to relatively fast speech affects phonetic realizations independent of factors operative in the production contexts. Thus, word and segment rates reflect cumulative (lexicalized) effects of words’ experience in fast speech contexts. The results suggest that lexically specific cumulative measures should be incorporated into models of linguistic variation and change.

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The Interaction of Linguistic and Contextual Number Markers in Andalusian Spanish ∗

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Quantifying the Functional Consequences of Spanish [s] Lenition

Quantifying the Functional Consequences of Spanish [s] Lenition

A community-based test of a linguistic hypothesis

Lexically specific accumulation in memory of word and segment speech rates

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