© 2017 Christopher David Eager CONTRAST PRESERVATION AND CONSTRAINTS ON INDIVIDUAL PHONETIC VARIATION BY CHRISTOPHER DAVID EAGER DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Spanish in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor José Ignacio Hualde, Chair Professor Jennifer S. Cole, Northwestern University Associate Professor Anna María Escobar Associate Professor Ryan K. Shosted Dr. Joseph Roy Abstract Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of modern Linguistics, described language as a system where everything holds together. Regarding the sounds of language, this has led to the current view that the phonology of a language consists of a complex system of relations between contrastive phonemes. In this dissertation, I test whether there are constraints on individual phonetic variation from a multivariate perspective due to this system of relations, and how these constraints interact with contrast preservation. Two main views of contrast preservation are considered. The first view is that contrast preservation is merely an outcome of other regular phonetic processes that affect multiple consonants simultaneously. The second view is that contrast preservation acts as a constraint on the phonetic realization of phonemes. To this end, two phonetic experiments are performed. In both experiments, multiple acoustic measures of intervocalic consonant strength are taken, and PCA is used for dimensionality reduction, resulting in measures of overall consonant strength. These measures are then analyzed with Bayesian linear mixed effects regression (using weakly informative priors and maximal random effects structures) in order to obtain distributional information about both populations and individual speakers. In the first experiment, word-medial intervocalic /s/ and /f/ are compared for Valladolid Spanish and Barcelona Catalan. Both Catalan and Spanish have the fricatives /s/ and /f/, neither has /v/ contrasting with /f/, and only Catalan has /z/ contrasting with /s/. The results show that Catalan /s/ is stronger than Spanish /s/, but there is no evidence for a difference between the two language’s /f/ strengths, with strong evidence that the magnitude of the difference between ii Catalan and Spanish /s/ is larger than the magnitude of the difference between Catalan and Spanish /f/. I argue that these results are consistent with a role for contrast preservation as a constraint, with Catalan having stronger /s/ than Spanish because lenition of Catalan /s/ causes phonetic overlap with a contrasting phoneme, while lenition of Spanish /s/ does not. In the second experiment, the simultaneous lenition of Spanish intervocalic /ptk/ and /bdg/ in three dialects (Cuzco, Peru; Lima, Peru; and Valladolid, Spain) is examined. Cuzco is found to have the strongest productions for both /ptk/ and /bdg/, Lima the weakest for both, and Valladolid in between for both. That is, the same hierarchy of strength applies in both cases, though the evidence for the difference between Valladolid and Lima /ptk/ is considerably weaker than the evidence for the other differences. I argue that the results are consistent with constraints on multivariate variation at the dialectal level, but that further research is required to see how constraints at the individual level relate to population differences. Examining individual variation in both experiments, I find that the degree to which an individual speaker lenites /f/ is correlated with the degree to which they lenite /s/, and that the degree to which they lenite /ptk/ is correlated with both the degree to which they lenite /bdg/ and the degree to which they lenite /sf/. These correlations represent a significant constraint on individual phonetic variation from a multivariate perspective. While a connection between individuals’ /ptk/ and /bdg/ lenitions can be explained by both the constraint and outcome views of contrast preservation, the correlation between /sf/ and /ptk/ and the correlation between /s/ and /f/ lend support to the outcome view, and Catalan having stronger /s/ than Spanish but not stronger /f/ lends support to the constraint view. I argue for a framework in which acoustic lenition in a variety of intervocalic consonants may share a common articulatory source of lenition, giving rise to constraints on individual phonetic iii variation that may lead to contrast preservation as an outcome, but where there may additionally be a role for contrast preservation as a constraint. I conclude by discussing the importance of further acoustic studies that use the methodologies employed here, and studies that explore the articulatory and perceptual implications of the results. iv Acknowledgments Collection of the Peruvian speakers’ data was supported by a fellowship from the Dorothea S. and Norman E. Whitten Endowment Fund of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’m very grateful to the members of my committee (José Ignacio Hualde, Jennifer Cole, Ryan Shosted, Anna María Escobar, and Joseph Roy) for their mentorship during my time here in Urbana; it is impossible to quantify how much I have learned by taking classes from and working with them. I’d also like to thank Mark Hasegawa-Johnson for advice on intensity measurements, and Juan María Garrido for giving me access to the Glissando corpus. v To my parents, Tim and Pam, for always being supportive and believing in me. And to my fiancé, Austin, for putting up with me while I wrote this. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2. Phonetic methods ........................................................................................................ 27 Chapter 3. Statistical methods ....................................................................................................... 54 Chapter 4. Spanish and Catalan fricative results ........................................................................ 103 Chapter 5. Spanish plosive results .............................................................................................. 117 Chapter 6. Individual variation results ........................................................................................ 143 Chapter 7. Discussion ................................................................................................................. 154 References ................................................................................................................................... 164 Appendix A. Fricative experiment supplement .......................................................................... 177 Appendix B. Plosive experiment supplement ............................................................................. 181 vii Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1. Goal of this dissertation Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of modern Linguistics, described language as a system where everything holds together (Saussure, 1986[1916]). Regarding the sounds of language, this has led to the current view that the phonology of a language consists of a complex system of relations between contrastive phonemes. The goal of this dissertation to demonstrate that there are constraints on individual phonetic variation from a multivariate perspective due to this system of relations, and that these constraints interact with contrast preservation. In so doing, I also make methodological contributions to phonetics by increasing the degree to which measures are automated and employing dimensionality reduction on multivariate response variables, and to statistical modeling in linguistics through the use of Bayesian mixed effects regressions to obtain distributional information about individual speakers. These methodological contributions allow inference to be made on both populations and individuals using all of the information available in a dataset. In this chapter, I begin in Section 1.2 with a discussion of differing views of contrast preservation (contrast preservation as a constraint and as an outcome) and why we might expect individual phonetic variation to be constrained from a multivariate perspective. In Section 1.3, I introduce the phonemic inventories for two related Western Romance languages, Spanish and Catalan, which serve as the languages of study in this dissertation. In Section 1.4, I describe the motivations for the first experiment, which compares Spanish and Catalan /s/ and /f/ lenition. In Section 1.5, I describe the motivations for the second experiment, which compares /ptk/ and 1 /bdg/ lenition in three dialects of Spanish. In Section 1.6, I give specific hypotheses concerning the results of these experiments. In Chapter 2, I discuss the phonetic measurements of consonant strength taken as dependent variables, and the factors and covariates included as fixed effects in the analyses. I also discuss the following three phonetic methodological contributions I make in detail: (1) the automation of a duration measurement that can apply to any intervocalic consonant; (2) the treatment of zero-valued observations and non-zero-valued observations in a continuous fashion when a value of zero has meaning; and (3) the use of principal components analysis to reduce the dimensionality of multivariate dependent variables rather than running multiple regressions,