Cascadilla Proceedings Project: Paper 1385


Home page

List of proceedings

Enter a document #:
Enter search terms:




Info for readers

Info for authors

Info for editors

Info for libraries



Order form

Shopping cart

Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium
edited by Nuria Sagarra and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio

ISBN 1-57473-413-X library binding
vi + 341 pages
publication date: 2006
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA

Table of contents



Abstract

Matthew C. Alba
Accounting for Variability in the Production of Spanish Vowel Sequences
273-285 (complete pdf)

The resolution of hiatus (heterosyllabic adjacent vowels) has long been a topic of interest in Spanish phonology, yet with few exceptions it has not been studied empirically. Previous accounts, limited mainly to consideration of structural factors such as vowel quality and stress, have fallen short of an adequate explanation of this phenomenon as it occurs in real language use, largely because they have failed to account for the variability encountered therein. The current study is the first to deal with this issue of hiatus resolution within the theoretical framework of usage-based phonology, which proposes that patterns of use play a key role in creating and shaping the form and content of the sound systems of languages. This study focuses specifically on the variability found in hiatus resolution between words in New Mexican Spanish, and assesses how frequency of use, in addition to structural and other factors, contributes to this variability. The methodology is variationist. 1,912 tokens of hiatus were extracted from a large corpus of spoken discourse and coded for a variety of factors, including stress, vowel quality, syllable structure, word class (content vs. function), previous mention, and token frequency. Multivariate analysis was performed to evaluate the relative contribution of these factors as they operated simultaneously, revealing that frequency (specifically patterns of lexical co-occurrence), in addition to structural factors (especially vowel quality and stress), played a significant role in determining how hiatus was resolved. The results enhance our understanding of hiatus resolution by shedding light on important factors that have previously gone unexplored, and also provide support for the notion of phonological structure set forth in the usage-based model of phonology.


Copyright © 2006 Cascadilla Proceedings Project. All rights reserved. To request permission to copy any elements from our pages, or to send comments or questions about our pages, please write to webmaster@cascadilla.com and make sure to provide the URL of the particular page. This page last updated 28 August 2006.