“¿Tomas [pepsi], [peksi] or [pesi]?”: A variationist sociolinguistic analysis of Spanish syllable coda stops

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Published: Dec 7, 2018
Keywords:
stops, Spanish, velarization, deletion, phonological variation

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Silvina Bongiovanni

Abstract

This study analyzes deletion and velarization of word-internal syllable coda /p b t d k g/ by native speakers of Spanish. A total of 945 tokens were analyzed from speech samples of 36 speakers from the corpus Estudio Sociolingüístico del Habla de Caracas (Bentivoglio & Sedano, 1987), with equal representation of socioeconomic levels, ages and sex. The results of the present study show that labial, dental and velar coda stops have different linguistic distributions and that they retain, velarize, and delete at different rates. The analysis reveals that deletion of velars is favored by the working class, younger speakers, males, and high frequency lexical items. Deletion of labial and dentals, on the other hand, is favored by dental stops, the younger age group, and the working class. With regards to velarization, the results of the current study contrast with research by González & Pereda (1998) in that the present study reveals that while all social classes velarize, it is only significant for the middle and working classes. Taken together, the analysis of deletion and velarization shows that the two processes have different sociolinguistic distributions. Additionally, the present study offers a discussion for the role of lexical frequency in the realization of coda stops.

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Article Details

Issue
Vol. 14 No. 2 (2014): Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Sociolinguistic Phenomena Across Spanish Varieties
Section
Articles

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