This book focuses on contemporary sociolinguistic approaches to Spanish dialectology. Each of the authors draws on key issues of contemporary sociolinguistics, combining theoretical approaches with empirical data collection. Overall, these chapters address topics concerning language variation and… read more
The present investigation examines the expression of futurity (periphrastic vs. morphological future) in Spanish in corpora from Caracas, Venezuela, Mexico City, Mexico, and three cities in Spain. The results indicate that, in the Caracas and Mexico City data, the periphrastic future (PF) has… read more
The Spanish palatal fricative /ʝ/, a site of considerable social variation, is examined in Caracas, Venezuela, comparing productions across a 20-year period. Based on spectrographic and acoustic analyses, we identify four allophones of the palatal fricative. While approximant use in Caracas has… read more
We examine social and linguistic factors, including lexical frequency, that influence variable production of the alveolar rhotic trill in Caracas, Venezuela, and the region surrounding Caguas, Puerto Rico. Two categories of rhotic productions are established: non-innovative trills with two or… read more
This study considers attitudes about variable production of coda /?/ and syllable-initial /r/ in Puerto Rico. Two actors produced typical Puerto Rican allophonic variants of coda /?/ and syllable-initial /r/. Indirect attitudes of sixteen urban speakers were measured through a matched-guise task,… read more
This chapter offers a general perspective concerning the origins of American Spanish. This introductory chapter broadly includes the most relevant aspects that characterize Spanish varieties in South America. The first part reviews the influence of the settlers in the formation of Spanish in… read more
Sociolinguistic analyses of pa(ra) “for” have found that both linguistic and social factors play a significant role in speaker use of the reduced (pa’) and full (para) forms (e.g., Bentivoglio et al. 2005). However, no study to date has analyzed the extent to which production of these forms is most… read more
This investigation extends the research on the use of Spanish copulas ser and estar in Venezuela to all [copula + adjective] contexts (see De Jonge 1993; Malaver 2000 for work on expressions of age). Findings reveal that resultant state, adjective class, predicate type, experience with the… read more
While much acoustic-phonetic evidence has accumulated which proves the existence of two phonetically distinct peak alignments (L+H* and L*+H) in Spanish declaratives, whether or not the two alignments are phonologically distinct remains a topic of debate. The goal of the present paper is to utilize… read more
The present paper examines the constraints governing the acquisition of sociolinguistic variables. More specifically, it investigates the acquisition of the school variety of Venezuelan Spanish characterized, according to previous research, by increased levels of retention of [ð̞] in… read more
