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Accounting for Coda Effects in a Caribbean Spanish Dialect

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Accounting for Coda Effects in a Caribbean Spanish Dialect An alignment-based account of coda effects in a Caribbean Spanish dialect* Carlos-Eduardo Piñeros University of Iowa A phonological trait that is common to all Caribbean Spanish dialects is their tendency to restrict the types of consonant that can appear in syllable-final position. It is well documented that in this family of Spanish dialects, syllable-final consonants undergo a variety of processes including debuccalization, partial or total assimilation, nasal velarization, nasal absorption, vocalization, and deletion. As many previous studies have pointed out, all of these processes are geared towards changing closed syllables into open ones. Although the preference for open syllables is quite strong in Caribbean Spanish, it would seem that none of these dialects has reached the state in which all syllables are open. This is evident in the case of those dialects where syllable-final obstruents are regularly deleted while sonorant consonants are faithfully preserved (e.g. [do.to] < /dokto/ ‘doctor’). But the situation is not as clear in the case of a peculiar dialect spoken in the northern and central regions of the Dominican Republic, where both obstruent and sonorant consonants are avoided syllable finally (e.g. [do.toi ] < /dokto/ ‘doctor’). What makes it hard to aver that all syllables are open in this dialect is that besides the glide [i ], syllable-final consonants can turn into segments such as [h], [], and nasals that are homorganic with a following stop/affricate. In this paper, I use an alignment-based approach to account for the processes that affect syllable-final consonants in this particular variety of Dominican Spanish. This proposal reveals that the segments [h] and [] are not consonants but glides on a par with [i ]. All of these glides are parsed by the syllable nucleus, where they function as the offglides of 2 the diphthongs [Vh], [V ], and [Vi ]. Furthermore, because those nasals that surface sharing place features with a following stop/affricate are not the first member of an NC cluster, but the nasal component of a prenasalized consonant parsed by the syllable onset, it is indeed possible to conclude that in this Caribbean Spanish dialect all syllables are open. Central to this analysis is a family of alignment constraints that regulates the distribution of consonants within the syllable (Itô and Mester 1994, 1999, Piñeros 2001), as well as a family of correspondence constraints that regulate the identiy between input and output forms (McCarthy and Prince 1995). Coda effects are shown to follow from the interaction of these two constraint families under the supervision of markedness constraints, which are capable of blocking the application of phonological processes when their outcome is a highly marked structure. 1. Coda effects in Northern Rustic Dominican Spanish The term Northern Rustic Dominican Spanish (NRDS) will be used here to refer to a variety of Spanish spoken by illiterate people in the central and northern regions of the Dominican Republic. Although better known as ‘Cibaeño’, I adopt the term Northern Rustic Dominican Spanish because this dialect is spoken beyond the borders of El Cibao, and also because it is not the speech of all people in the area, but only of those who belong to the lower cultural levels, especially peasants (Jiménez Sabater 1975, Golibart 1976).1 The most salient phonological property of NRDS is its strong tendency to simplify consonants in syllable-final position (Henríquez Ureña 1940, Navarro Tomás 1956, Jiménez Sabater 1975). Stops, fricatives, nasals, and liquids are all avoided syllable finally, and although not all consonants that are assigned to the syllable coda are lost, the inventory of 3 syllable-final segments is drastically reduced as a consequence of subjecting coda consonants to processes such as vocalization, assimilation, coalescence, debuccalization, and deletion. The data in (1-4) show how the different consonant classes are affected by these processes. Liquid consonants in the syllable coda are avoided through vocalization, the most studied aspect of the phonology of NRDS (Golibart 1976, Alba 1979, Guitart 1981, Rojas 1982, Harris 1983, Nuñez-Cedeño 1997). As the examples in (1) show, when assigned to syllable-final position, both lateral and rhotic liquids surface as [i ], a palatal offglide, which forms a falling diphthong with the preceding vowel: [Vi ]. The productivity of this process is reflected by the fact that it takes place whether the liquid consonant belongs to a word- internal or a word-final syllable, and regardless if that syllable is stressed or unstressed.2 (1) Liquids /sebesa/ Æ [sei ésa] ‘beer’ /kome/ Æ [koméi ] ‘to eat’ /kota/ Æ [koi tái ] ‘to cut’ /palmita/ Æ [pai míta] ‘small palm tree’ /kulpa/ Æ [kúi pa] ‘blame’ When assigned to the syllable coda, nasals either adopt the place features of an adjacent segment (assimilation) or coalesce with it (absorption). The data in (2a) show that a nasal consonant takes on the place of articulation of a following stop/affricate. By contrast, if followed by any other type of consonant, the nasal either becomes velar, causing the obligatory nasalization of the preceding vowel, or it coalesces with that vowel, (2b). These are also the two possible realizations of nasal consonants in word-final position, (2c). 4 (2) Nasals a. /kanpo/ Æ [kampo] ‘field’ /ondo/ Æ [ondo] ‘deep’ /sinko/ Æ [siko] ‘five’ /anco/ Æ [anco] ‘wide’ b. /konfiansa/ Æ [ko fja sa] ~ [kofjasa] ‘trust’ /sanha/ Æ [sa ha] ~ [saha] ‘ditch’ /enlase/ Æ [e lase] ~ [elase] ‘link’ /onra/ Æ [o ra] ~ [ora] ‘honor’ c. /raton/ Æ [rato ] ~ [rato] ‘mouse’ /seun/ Æ [seu ] ~ [seu] ‘according to’ Following Bakovic (2000), I take the velar nasals in (2b,c) to be the phonetic realization of the nasal glide known as the anusvara (Trigo 1988). This is supported by the phonetic description of these velar nasals, which are often articulated without full contact between the tongue dorsum and the velum, and although their nasality is clearly perceptible, as it is enhanced by its extension to the preceding segment, their place of articulation is not because there is minimal or no movement of the articulatory organs from the position that they adopt for the preceding vowel (D’Introno and Sosa 1984). Because the lowering of the velum takes place while the tongue is still in the position for the preceding vowel, the velar constriction of these nasals is the cooperative effect of two articulatory gestures that belong to different segments: the tongue-body raising of the vowel and the velum lowering of the nasal. These phonetic observations support the view defended by Paradis and Prunet (1990, 1993) that the velar quality of such nasals is a consequence of their sharing the Dorsal 5 articulator of the vowel that precedes them. According to this, the velar nasals in (2b,c) arise through progressive place assimilation. Therefore, what all the nasals in (2) have in common is that they surface without place features of their own. Moving on to obstruent consonants, it should be noted that /s/ is by far the most frequent sound of the set of Spanish fricatives that Latin American Spanish dialects accept syllable finally (e.g. /f, s, x/).3 Words containing syllable-final /f/ or /x/ are rather scarce in the language, and it turns out that /x/ never emerges in NRDS because this dialect uses /h/ instead (e.g. [hwan] instead of [xwan] ‘Juan’).4 The data in (3) show that in NRDS syllable- final fricatives may be completely lost, or merely debuccalized. The outcome of debuccalization is a glottal approximant, [h], which has also been described as a voiceless vowel because its articulation does not involve a constriction anywhere in the vocal tract, but only a flow of air that passes through the glottis as the tongue remains in the same position for the preceding vowel (Goodgall de Pruna 1970). Hence, because Spanish has five different vowels that can precede it, there are actually five different phonetic varieties of [h]. What this means for the representation of [h] is that this segment does not bear place features of its own but shares those of the preceding vowel. Another property of [h] that phoneticians have remarked is that this sound cannot be considered a fricative consonant because no audible noise is produced as the breath stream passes through the glottis (Heffner 1950, Ladefoged 1982, Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). (3) Fricatives a. /pasto/ Æ [pato] ~ [pahto] ‘grass’ /isla/ Æ [ila] ~ [ihla] ‘island’ /aros/ Æ [aro] ~ [aroh] ‘rice’ 6 b. /difteia/ Æ [diteja] ~ [dihteja] ‘diphtheria’ /aftosa/ Æ [atosa] ~ [ahtosa] ‘foot-and-mouth desease’ Consider next the case of stops. A stop consonant that is assigned to the syllable coda may either delete, or vocalize, (4). When vocalization takes place, the outcome is always a palatal offglide, which gives rise to the same falling diphthong created by liquid vocalization, [Vi ]. In this regard, NRDS is unlike other Spanish dialects where stop vocalization also occurs. In Rustic Chilean Spanish, for example, the labial and dorsal stops may turn into either a labio-dorsal offglide, [u], or a palatal offglide, whereas only the coronal stops vocalize invariably to the palatal offglide (Oroz 1966, Martínez-Gil 1996, 1997, Piñeros 2001).5 That is to say that in contrast to the stop vocalization process that occurs in Rustic Chilean Spanish, where the place specification of the underlying stop may be preserved ([i ] preserves the coronality of /t/ and /d/, while [u] preserves the labiality of /p/ and /b/, and the dorsality of /k/ and //), the vocalization of syllable-final stops in NRDS always favors the emergence of the universally unmarked place of articulation: Coronal. This is in line with the view adopted here that vocoids are doubly articulated segments in which the tongue body (e.g.
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