Intervocalic /d/ deletion in Málaga: Frequency effects and linguistic factors

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Rob Bedinghaus
Beatriz Sedó

Abstract

The current study examines the deletion of intervocalic /d/ in the Spanish of Málaga, Spain, based on a corpus of transcribed interview data (Lasarte Cervantes, Sánchez Sáez, Ávila Muñoz, & Villena Ponsoda, 2009). The focus of the study is the analysis of the effect of type and token frequency on the deletion of intervocalic /d/ from the perspective of Bybee’s Usage-Based Model (2003), an approach only recently applied to the study of intervocalic /d/ deletion (Díaz-Campos and Gradoville, 2011, for the Spanish of Caracas).


The results of this study indicate that the deletion rate was higher for Málaga than for other varieties of Spanish (Cedergren, 1973; Díaz-Campos & Gradoville, 2011; D’Introno & Sosa, 1986; López Morales, 1983; Samper Padilla, 1996) both in general and in the context [+ado, +past participle]. We suggest that the more frequent use of present perfect in Peninsular Spanish (Howe, 2006; Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos, 2008) may have an effect on the deletion rate in the past participle. We also propose that the absence of a statistical effect of lexical frequency is due to the fact that the phenomenon is so advanced in this variety of Spanish that it has generalized to less frequent items too.

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