The category of APPROXIMANT sounds has been defined and redefined by leading phoneticians and recognized by the International Phonetic Association; nonetheless, within this class of sounds, semivowels, rhotic sonorants and other approximants such as [B § D § V § ] are not clearly differentiated. In a recently-published study, Martínez-Celdrán (2004) proposes a new definition which considers approximants as a category composed of several subclasses of sounds. In this paper, an acoustic analysis of the approximants [B § D § V § ] in Galician is presented. We will show that open and closed approximants, stops and fricatives present statistically significant differences both in duration and intensity, demonstrating the pertinence of the categorization postulated by Martínez-Celdrán.

This exploratory study presents an approach to the phonetic models of Galician Spanish (GS) by means of a small sample of six female speakers with different linguistic profiles. We analyze the production of stressed vowels, final unstressed vowels, and some intonation contours. Unlike earlier descriptions, we do not find direct transfer from Galician to the GS phonetic system. Our results show: (1) The disappearance of the Galician seven vowel system and some examples of hybridization in wh-question intonation, both of which could be seen as signs of change in GS; and (2) The reduction of the final vowels and direct transfer from Galician to GS in yes-no questions, both of which could suggest preservation of the covert prestige of Galician.

La lengua de las comunidades rurales se encuentra sometida a grandes presiones de cambio, tanto por la presencia de la lengua estándar como, en el caso de Galicia, de la lengua española. Entre los cambios lingüísticos destacan algunos que se refieren a la fonética y a la fonología y que van en la dirección de converger con el estándar gallego y, en parte, con el español. En este trabajo vamos a explorar una de estas variedades rurales, que presenta un sistema de sibilantes diferente del estándar gallego y del español, a través del análisis de las sibilantes de dos grupos de hablantes de localidades muy próximas entre sí, con personas de dos grupos de edad en cada una de ellas, trataremos de determinar si se detectan algunos de los cambios que se describen en estudios anteriores, en qué medida y en qué dirección, así como si se perciben resistencias al cambio en los miembros de los grupos más jóvenes.

No abstract