Cover not available

In:Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015
Edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15] 2018
► pp. 95–120

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Chapter 5
The simultaneous lenition of Spanish /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ as a chain shift in progress

 | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Published online: 14 February 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.06eag
Abstract
This study examines dialect differences in the simultaneous lenition of intervocalic /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ in Peruvian Spanish in Lima and Cuzco. Results from a read speech task show both sets of plosives are lenited significantly less in Cuzco than in Lima. Random forests demonstrate that differences in voicing best explain the distinction between /ptk/ and /bdɡ/, that differences in relative intensity best explain the distinction in Lima, and that in order to best distinguish Cuzco /bdɡ/ from Lima /ptk/, relative intensity must be given more importance than voicing. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that these lenitions constitute a chain shift in progress and offer insight into how these shifts may occur.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Push chain shifts
    • 1.2Lima Spanish
    • 1.3Cuzco Spanish
    • 1.4Motivation for the current study
  • 2.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Tasks and recording
    • 3.4Acoustic measures
      • 3.4.1Constriction
      • 3.4.2Duration and voicing
    • 3.5Data segmentation
    • 3.6Data extraction
    • 3.7Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1/ptk/
      • 4.1.1/ptk/ voiceless period duration
      • 4.1.2/ptk/ intensity difference
    • 4.2/bdɡ/
      • 4.2.1/bdɡ/ voiceless period duration
      • 4.2.2/bdɡ/ intensity difference
    • 4.3Dialect differences in variable importance and classification accuracy
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Evaluation of hypotheses
    • 5.2Simultaneous lenition of /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ in Spanish as a push chain shift
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
References (50)
References
Baker, G. K. (2006). Duration, voice, and dispersion in stop contrasts from Latin to Spanish. In F. Martínez-Gil, & S. Colina (Eds.), Optimality-theoretic studies in Spanish phonology (pp. 399–423). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(3), 255–278. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2016). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 6.0.21). Amsterdam. Retrieved from <[URL]>
Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1986). Towards an articulatory phonology. Phonology Yearbook, 3(21), 9–252.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1992). Articulatory phonology: An overview. Phonetica, 49(3–4), 155–180. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caravedo, R. (1990). Sociolingüística del español de Lima. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carrasco, P. (2008). An acoustic study of voiced stop allophony in Costa Rican Spanish. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carrasco, P., Hualde, J. I., & Simonet, M. (2012). Dialectal differences in Spanish voiced obstruent allophony: Costa Rican versus Iberian Spanish. Phonetica, 69(3), 149–179. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carvalho, J. Brandão. (2008). Western Romance. In J. Brandão de Carvalho et al. (Eds.), Lenition and Fortition (pp. 207–233). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cepeda, G. (1991). Las consonantes de Valdivia. Valdivia: Fondecyt, Universidad Austral de Chile.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cole, J., Hualde, J. I., & Iskarous, K. (1999). Effects of prosodic and segmental context on /g/-lenition in Spanish. In O. Fujimura, B. D. Joseph, & B. Palek (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Linguistics and Phonetics Conference (Vol. 2, pp. 575–589). Prague: The Karolinum Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Delforge, A. M. (2009). The rise and fall of unstressed vowel reduction in the Spanish of Cusco, Peru: A sociophonetic study. ERIC.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012). “Nobody wants to sound like a provinciano”: The recession of unstressed vowel devoicing in the Spanish of Cusco, Perú. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(3), 311–335. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eager, C. D. (2015). Automated voicing analysis in Praat: Statistically equivalent to manual segmentation. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK: University of Glasgow.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eddington, D. (2011). What are the contextual phonetic variants of /b d g/ in colloquial Spanish? Probus, 23(1), 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Escobar, A. M. (2011). Spanish in contact with Quechua. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.J), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics (pp. 321–352). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gafos, A. I. (2002). A grammar of gestural coordination. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 20(2), 269–337. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gordon, M. J. (2013). Investigating chain shifts and mergers. In J. K. Chambers, & N. Schilling (Eds.), The handbook of language variation and change (pp. 203–219). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hualde, J. I. (2005). The sounds of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hualde, J. I., Simonet, M., & Nadeu, M. (2011). Consonant lenition and phonological recategorization. Laboratory Phonology, 2(2), 301–329. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lavoie, L. M. (2001). Consonant strength: Phonological patterns and phonetic manifestations. New York, NY: Garland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lenth, R. V., & Hervao, M. (2015). lsmeans: Least-squares means. Retrieved from <[URL]>
Lewis, A. (1999). Contrast maintenance and intervocalic stop lenition in Spanish and Portuguese: When is it alright to lenite? In T. Satterfield, C. Tortora, & D. Cresti (Eds.), Current issues in Romance languages (pp. 159–171). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2000). Acoustic variability of intervocalic voiceless stop consonants in three Spanish dialects. In H. Campos, E. Herburger, A. Morales-Front, & T. J. Walsh (Eds.), Hispanic linguistics at the turn of the millennium: Papers from the 3rd Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 101–114). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2001). Weakening of intervocalic /ptk/ in two Spanish dialects: Toward the quantification of lenition processes. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liaw, A., & Wiener, M. (2002). Classification and regression by randomForest. R News, 2(3), 18–22.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lipski, J. M. (1994). Latin American Spanish. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Machuca-Ayuso, M. J. (1997). Las obstruyentes no continuas del español: Relación entre las categorías fonéticas y fonológicas en habla espontánea. Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martinet, A. (1952). Function, structure, and sound change. Word, 8(1), 1–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martínez-Celdrán, E. (2009). Sonorización de las oclusivas sordas en una hablante murciana: Problemas que plantea. Estudios de Fonética Experimental, 18, 254–271.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munday, P. (2001). An acoustic study of Spanish voiceless stops in three speaking styles. New York, NY: New York University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oftedal, M. (1985). Lenition in Celtic and in Insular Spanish: The secondary voicing of stops in Gran Canaria. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ohala, J. J. (1983). The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints. In P. F. MacNeilage (Ed.), The production of speech (pp. 189–216). New York, NY: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ohala, J. J., & Riordan, C. J. (1979). Passive vocal tract enlargement during voiced stops. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 65(1).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Rourke, E., & Fafulas, S. (2015). Spanish in Contact in the Peruvian Amazon: An examination of intervocalic voiced stops. In E. Willis et al. (Eds.), Selected procedings of the 6th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology (pp. 145–162). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ortega-Llebaria, M. (2004). Interplay between phonetic and inventory constraints in the degree of spirantization of voiced stops: Comparing intervocalic /b/ and intervocalic /ɡ/ in Spanish and English. In T. L. Face (Ed.), Laboratory approaches to Spanish phonology (pp. 237–253). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Parrell, B. (2010). Articulation from acoustics: Estimating constriction degree from the acoustic signal. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128(4), 2289.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Penny, R. (2002). A history of the Spanish language (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez, H. E. (2007). Estudio de la variación estilística de la serie/bdg/en posición intervocálica en el habla de los noticieros de la televisión chilena. Estudios de Fonética Experimental, 16, 228–259.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Silva, J. I. (1999, October). The psycholinguistic basis of Andean Spanish Morpho-Syntax: The role of second language acquisition principles in language contact. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poblete, M. T. (1992). La sonorización de las obstruyentes sordas/p, t, k/en el habla urbana de Valdivia. Estudios Filológicos, 27, 73–94.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 3.3.2). Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from <[URL]>
Singmann, H., Bolker, B., & Westfall, J. (2015). afex: Analysis of factorial experiments. Retrieved from <[URL]>
Soler, A., & Romero, J. (1999). The role of duration in stop lenition in Spanish. In Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 483–486). San Francisco, CA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Torreblanca, M. (1976). La sonorización de las oclusivas sordas en el habla toledana. Boletín de La Real Academia Española, 56(207), 117–146.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Torreira, F., & Ernestus, M. (2011). Realization of voiceless stops and vowels in conversational French and Spanish. Laboratory Phonology, 2(2), 331–353. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turk, A., Nakai, S., & Sugahara, M. (2006). Acoustic segment durations in prosodic research: A practical guide. Methods in Empirical Prosody Research, 3, 1–28.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vogel, A. P., Maruff, P., Snyder, P. J., & Mundt, J. C. (2009). Standardization of pitch-range settings in voice acoustic analysis. Behavior Research Methods, 41(2), 318–324. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue