Final devoicing and deletion of /-d/ in Castilian Spanish

Abstract

In the Spanish of north-western Spain, word-final /-d/ shows a remarkable variety of phonetic outcomes. Its possible realizations include voiced approximants, voiceless fricatives and voiced and voiceless plosives, in addition to the deletion of the segment. Here we examine this complex pattern of allophony in a corpus of conversational speech, focusing on the effect of the following phonological context. The results show that most commonly /-d/ is either deleted or realized as a voiceless fricative. Voiceless fricatives are found in all phrasal contexts, but with significantly higher frequency before pause than before a vowel, which is consistent with the hypothesis of diachronic extension of the devoicing from the former context to the latter. The devoicing of /-d/ is neutralizing. Voiceless fricative realizations of /-d/ do not differ from those of phonemic /-θ/ either in amount of voicing or in duration. This implies that deletion and devoicing represent two alternative patterns of reduction starting from [ð], since phonemic /-θ/ is not subject to deletion. Whereas the deletion of /-d/ has lexical exceptions, its devoicing does not. Among the majority of /d/-final words, for which deletion is possible, the relative frequency with which they undergo deletion vs. devoicing appears to vary substantially depending on the specific lexical item. That is, both position in phrase and lexical identity probabilistically determine the realization of /-d/. In addition to contributing to our understanding of the synchronic and diachronic phonology of word-final obstruents in Spanish, we consider the extent to which these data, showing variable word-final devoicing, may help us understand the historical evolution of the crosslinguistically common phenomenon of systematic word-final devoicing.

Cognate similarity and intervocalic /d/ production in Riverense Spanish

“…Brown (2015), studying spirantization in word-initial /d/, found no significant frequency effect, but rather found that the frequency a word had /d/ occurring in contexts favorable to spirantization influenced whether spirantization occurred when /d/ appeared in unfavorable contexts. Looking at Peninsular Spanish processes affecting word-final /d/, Hualde and Eager (2016) found no significant effect for lexical frequency in their sample.…”

Coronal stop lenition in French and Spanish: Electropalatographic evidence

“…Although devoicing and fricativization have been attested since the Middle Ages, deletion is a relatively more recent phenomenon, dating to the second half of the 15 th century, and exhibiting lexical effects (Ariza, 2012, p. 154). Of these three processes, fricativization is only observed in Peninsular Spanish (Antón, 1998;García Mouton & Molina Martos, 2015;González, 2002;Hualde & Eager, 2016;Molina Martos, 2016;Navarro Tomás, 1977;Pérez Castillejos, 2012). Devoicing and deletion appear to be more geographically widespread and have been reported to be conditioned by speech style; in particular, deletion is present in informal speech (Hualde & Eager, 2016;Navarro Tomás, 1977, §102;see Molina Martos, 2016, for a distribution of variants in the province of Madrid) and seemingly absent from read speech (González, 2002;Pérez Castillejos, 2012).…”

“…Of these three processes, fricativization is only observed in Peninsular Spanish (Antón, 1998;García Mouton & Molina Martos, 2015;González, 2002;Hualde & Eager, 2016;Molina Martos, 2016;Navarro Tomás, 1977;Pérez Castillejos, 2012). Devoicing and deletion appear to be more geographically widespread and have been reported to be conditioned by speech style; in particular, deletion is present in informal speech (Hualde & Eager, 2016;Navarro Tomás, 1977, §102;see Molina Martos, 2016, for a distribution of variants in the province of Madrid) and seemingly absent from read speech (González, 2002;Pérez Castillejos, 2012). More importantly for the present study, two additional factors condition this process: deletion is more frequent in absolute word-final position than within a phrase (Navarro Tomás, 1977, §102; see Hualde & Eager, 2016, for experimental data), and conditioned by the specific lexical item.…”

The status of word-final phonetic phenomena

“…This phonological devoicing is generally thought not to have a phonetic motivation word-finally. Instead, it is hypothesized that there is a phonetic motivation only utterancefinally, due to the approach to the following pause (Hock 1991(Hock , 1999Hualde and Eager 2016). There is thus utterance-final breathy voice or partial, phonetically variable amounts of devoicing, which arise in what can be described as as near to assimilation to silence as possible (Hock 1991, 1999, Hualde and Eager 2016, Keating 1988, Lieberman 1967, Myers and Padgett 2014.…”

“…In the analogy theory, after this initial inherent phonetic push toward devoicing utterancefinally then the phenomenon can be phonologized utterance-finally, and analogized down to lower domain levels (Hock 1991, 1999, Hualde and Eager 2016. The analogy hypothesis provides a motivation and explanation for how phonological final devoicing is found at the right edges of words, when this would seemingly interfere with an inherent pressure to maintain voicing between voiced sounds, which phonological final devoicing interferes with in some cases.…”