XXVIII Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures 1

What happens to the vowels preceding /s/ in Venezuelan Spanish?

Olga Scrivner Indiana University [email protected]

November 18, 2012

1 Introduction

1.1 Venezuelan Variety of Spanish Venezuelan variety of Spanish is one of the Caribbean dialects of Spanish. Caribbean dialects are well known for their high rate of aspiration and deletion of syllable final /s/

1.2 Morphological Load Word final /s/ carries a high functional information: • Number distinction: singular - plural juguete ”toy” - juguetes ”toys”

• Person distinction: third-person singular - second-person singular: habla ”he/she speaks” - hablas ”you speak” Question: How speakers in /s/ deleting varieties preserve morphological information encoded in the lost morpheme? Answer: There are some compensatory changes in the vowels preceding /s/: 1. Change of vowel quality (Navarro Tomas´ 1939, 1966, Honsa 1965)

• Open-close contrast for mid-vowels /e,o/ • Front-back contrast for /a/

2. Change of vowel duration (Hammond and Resnick, 1975, Figueroa 2000)

1.3 Research Questions 1. Is there any systematic difference in vowel frequency in Venezuelan dialect?

2. What is the duration effect in these contexts?

3. What factors (linguistic and social) influence vowel frequency distribution?

2 Methodology

Data come from the corpus Estudio Sociolingu¨´ıstico de Caracas (Bentivoglio and Sedano 1987). XXVIII Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures 2 2.1 Data selection a. /s/ word-final: juguetes ”toys”, dos ”two” b. /s/ syllable-final: entrevista ”interview” Excluded items: • /s/ in onset : unos supuestos ”some assumptions” • Diphthong or hiatus: las t´ıas ”the aunts”, que estaba ” that I was” Points of measurement: • F1 and F2 values are measured at the central point of each vowel (Praat 4.0 Boersma, 2001). Normalization: • The data are normalized via NORM SUITE (Thomas 2007), using a speaker-extrinsic Labov ANAE method. http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/about_norm.php Calculation of Means (Plotnik 10.0 Labov, 2001) - New Approach: 1. Tokens must be split in two groups according to the /s/ status: • /s/ deleted or aspirated • /s/ retained 2. Each group must be split in a stress and unstressed subgroup 3. Each subgroup must be divided according to the /s/ function: • Morphemic /s/: casas ‘houses’ • Non-morphemic /s/: tres ‘three’, esta ‘this’ 4. Calculate mean value separately for each subgroup

vowel F1 F2 vowel F1 F2 i 495 2191 i 492 2097 e 612 1972 e 601 1946 Before morphemic /s/ Before non-morphemic /s/ o 606 1609 o 606 1564 a 698 1904 a 732 1805 u 518 1624 u 532 1459

Vowel Formants in the Context of Vowel Formants in the Context of Retained /s/ Vowels before retained /s/ Deleted and Aspirated /s/ 400 Red - Vowels before Morphemic /s/; Blue - Vowels before Non-Morphemic /s/ 400 500 i u i ) 500 i z e u H

( 600 u )

z 1

o t H ( n

a 1

t 600 m e o o r

n e

o 700 a F m r o F 700 800 a a a

800 2000 1900 1800 1700 1600 1500 1400 Formant 2 (Hz) 2200 2100 2000 1900 1800 1700 1600 1500 1400 Formant 2 (Hz) XXVIII Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures 3 2.2 Codification • 832 tokens

• Dependent variables: F1, F2

• Independent sociolinguistic variables: Sex, Age, Class

• Independent linguistic variables:

1. Frequency: lexical frequency was drawn from the online CREA corpus (‘Reference Corpus of Contemporary Spanish’) http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html 2. Stress: stress (autop´ısta ‘highway’) and non-stress (asustada ‘scared’) 3. Following context: vowel, consonant, pause 4. Duration: long vowel and short vowel (based on the median value (0.44 ms). 5. Morphemic status of /s/: morphemic (plural form and 2nd person) and non-morphemic 6. Type of /s/: retained, aspirated and deleted

3 Results

F1 - (/a/ raising) Factor groups Factors Weight F2 - (fronting) Age 65+ 0.67 Factor group Factor weight 14-29 0.54 Class High 0.55 30-45 0.30 Low 0.51 Type of /s/ deletion 0.67 Middle 0.44 aspiration 0.47 Morphemic Morphemic 0.55 retention 0.36 Status Non-morphemic 0.46 Duration short 0.64 long 0.36 33 88

3.1 Comparison between Male and Female Speakers

1. Fronting F2: a. Male speakers: /i/ (0.64) and /e/ (0.63) b. Female speakers: /o/ (0.59), /u/ (0.59) and /a/ (0.58); young speakers (0.56) and middle age group (0.55), and short vowels (0.58) 2. /a/ raising – Male speakers: short vowels (0.69) and older speakers (0.88) – Female speakers: short vowels (0.62) XXVIII Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures 4 4 Conclusion

1. Is there any systematic differences in the quality of vowels preceding /s/? – Yes, but the patterns differ from traditional open-close (/e,o/) and front-back (/a/) con- trasts: (a) Open-close opposition for vowel /a/ (b) Front-back contrast for /e,o,a,i,u/ 2. What is the duration effect in these contexts? – Shorter vowels are preferred in the morphemic contexts 3. What factors (linguistic and social) influence the vowel quality? (a) Fronting: Socio-economic group and Morphemic status (b) /a/ raising: Age, Type of /s/, and Duration 4. The study has suggested a novel method in calculating vowel means separately in the mor- phemic and non-morphemic context 5. The new method has detected language change patterns (fronting and /a/ raising)

Presentation can be downloaded at http://jones.ling.indiana.edu/˜obscrivn/

References

[1] Aleman, Iris. Desdoblamiento fonologico´ en el espanol˜ de Puerto Rico. Master’s thesis, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, PR, 1977.

[2] Bentivoglio, Paola and Mercedes Sedano. 1993. Estudio sociolingu¨´ıstico del habla de Cara- cas: el corpus de 1987. Universidad central de Venezuela.

[3] Figueroa, Neysa. 2000. An Acoustic and Perceptual Study of Vowels Preceding Deleted PostNuclear /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish.Hispanic Linguistics at the End of the Millennium. Ed. Hector Campos and Elena Herburger Somerville, MA:Cascadilla Press, 66-79.

[4] Hammond, Robert. 1978. An experimental verication of the phonemic status of open and closed vowels in Carribean Spanish. Corrientes actuales en la dialectologa del Caribe his- panico. Ed. Himberto Lopez Morales Univ. de Puerto Rico. 33-125.

[5] Lipsky, John M. El espanol˜ de America. Madrid: Catedra, 1994.

[6] Morales, Humberto Lopez. 1979. Desdoblamiento fonologico de /e a o/ en el espanol˜ del Cuba.” Estudios ofrecidos a Emilio Alarcos Llorach. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 153- 165.

[7] Thomas, Erik R. and Tyler Kendall. 2007. NORM: The vowel normalization and plotting suite. Online Resource: http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/