Systemic Contrast and the Diachrony of Spanish Sibilant Voicing

Bradley, Travis G.; Delforge, Ann Marie

doi:10.1075/cilt.274.04bra

Cited by 25 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…According to Robinson, this later influence took a long time to spread to Ecuadorian highlands, and it is likely that some remnants of the contrast survive in the form of pre-vocalic voicing. Bradley & Delforge (2006) reject Robinson's diachronic assumption, arguing that the lack of lexical voicing contrast in Ecuadorian Spanish indicates that this dialect had gone through an earlier stage of post-lexical devoicing. We would like to add that the diachronic development of /s/-voicing, as proposed by Robinson, is unexpected from the point of view of functional factors driving sound change development.…”

Section: S I B I L a N T V O I C I N G I N Q U I T O S P A N I S Hmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Consequently, it does not undergo coda delaryngealisation, and thus it does not meet the conditions for Phrase Level voicing, which only applies to the laryngeally unspecified S. The two types of derivation (for word-medial and word-final) /s/ are illustrated in (7). A rather different analysis of the Quito /s/-voicing pattern, couched within the Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995(Flemming , 2002, is provided by Bradley (2005) and Bradley & Delforge (2006). Within this analysis, /s/-voicing is…”

Section: S I B I L a N T V O I C I N G I N Q U I T O S P A N I S Hmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We find both gradient voicing of word-final /s/ before a vowel, and categorical coda /s/-voicing before a sonorant consonant. From the formal point of view, the analysis by Bradley (2005) and Bradley & Delforge (2006) could perhaps be extended to accommodate gradient pre-vocalic voicing and categorical pre-consonantal voicing. However, in the absence of an empirical link between the occurrence of contrast and either categoricity or gradience in the realisation of /s/-voicing, the explanation based on systemic contrast maintenance and the emergence of phonological /s/-voicing is a lot less compelling.…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Colina's (2009) analysis crucially predicts all cases of /s/-voicing to be gradient, whereas the cyclical account put forward by Bermú dez-Otero (2011) can accommodate categorical /s/-voicing. The analysis by Bradley (2005) and Bradley & Delforge (2006) makes the prediction that /s/-voicing is gradient pre-consonantally, but categorical in the word-final position before a vowel. Therefore, the predictions of the different theories can be tested by means of instrumental phonetic data.…”

Section: S I B I L a N T V O I C I N G I N Q U I T O S P A N I S Hmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bradley (2005) and Bradley & Delforge (2006) Surface contrasts are evaluated by systematic constraints which maximise the perceptual distinctness of output forms. The voicing of word-final prevocalic /s/ is formalised within this approach as a two-step process.…”

Section: S I B I L a N T V O I C I N G I N Q U I T O S P A N I S Hmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Phonetic evidence on phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Sibilant voicing in Quito Spanish

et al. 2013

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This paper presents new experimental data on Quito Spanish /s/-voicing, which has attracted considerable interest from theoretical phonologists owing to the overapplication of voicing to word-final pre-vocalic /s/. Bermúdez-Otero (2011) singles out Quito /s/-voicing as an important test case for discriminating between two competing theories of phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Output–output correspondence and cyclicity. Overapplication in /s/-voicing cannot be captured using correspondence relationship to a base form, which challenges Output–output correspondence as a theory of opacity. However, the argument only holds insofar as word-final pre-vocalic /s/-voicing is considered phonological, as Output–output correspondence can account for /s/-voicing assuming that it only applies in the phonetics (Colina 2009). We discuss the diverging empirical predictions concerning categoricity and gradience in the surface realisation of voicing processes. We further test these predictions based on acoustic data from seven speakers of Quito Spanish. Evidence from speech rate manipulations shows that some speakers produce more voicing during frication at normal speech rate, compared to fast, maintaining a stable voicing ratio across different speech rates. We argue that for these speakers, /s/-voicing is optional but categorical, and so it ought to be analysed as phonological. This result presents a challenge to the Output–output correspondence approach, but can be accommodated within cyclicity.

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Section: S I B I L a N T V O I C I N G I N Q U I T O S P A N I S Hmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: S I B I L a N T V O I C I N G I N Q U I T O S P A N I S Hmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: S I B I L a N T V O I C I N G I N Q U I T O S P A N I S Hmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: S I B I L a N T V O I C I N G I N Q U I T O S P A N I S Hmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Phonetic evidence on phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Sibilant voicing in Quito Spanish

et al. 2013

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Cyclicity

Bermádez-Otero¹

2011

The Blackwell Companion to Phonology

102

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The phonology of a natural language will often treat the same string differently according to whether it is wholly contained within a single morph, arises through a morphological operation like affixation, or straddles the edges of two adjacent grammatical words. In the generative tradition there is a widespread and longstanding consensus that such morphosyntactic conditioning effects may come about in two ways: representationally or procedurally (Scheer 2008: §3ff.; see Table 85.1). Representational morphosyntactic conditioning occurs when phonological processes are sensitive to the presence or absence of certain phonological objects—boundary symbols in SPE , prosodic categories in most later frameworks—which are in turn positioned by reference to the edges of morphosyntactic units. In procedural morphosyntactic conditioning, in contrast, morphosyntax directly controls the amount of structure visible during a given round of phonological computation, either by submitting to the phonology only a morphosyntactic sub‐constituent of a complete linguistic expression (as in the theory of the cycle) or by allowing the phonology access to the surface representation of some morphosyntactically related expression (as in the theory of transderivational or output‐ output correspondence, henceforth OO‐correspondence).

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Obstruent voicing before sonorants. The case of West-Flemish

Strycharczuk

Simon

2013

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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This article reports on an acoustic study of voicing in obstruents followed by a sonorant across a word boundary in two dialects of Dutch: East-and WestFlemish. In both varieties only gradient phonetic voicing was typically found in word-final stops when a sonorant followed in the next word. In addition, WestFlemish showed optional categorical voicing in word-final pre-sonorant fricatives. The voicing of fricatives is argued to be phonological, as it extends beyond the scope of automated coarticulation, and as the data pattern to form a distinct phonetic voicing target. However, the phonetic results do not support the hypothesis that West-Flemish sonorants are laryngeally specified, and thus able to spread voicing to neighbouring fricatives. Instead, fricative voicing is proposed to be an optional positional realisation in West-Flemish. Although the process cannot be directly motivated by reference to the phonological specifications of the segments surrounding its target, it makes sense in terms of perceptual factors leading to diachronic reanalysis. The West-Flemish positional variation may arise when partially voiced fricatives are perceived and subsequently reanalysed as categorically voiced by listeners, as proposed by Jansen (2004). It is further argued that fricatives are more likely than stops to be reinterpreted as voiced, as additional acoustic cues prevent voiced percepts in passively voiced stops.

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Systemic Contrast and the Diachrony of Spanish Sibilant Voicing

Cited by 25 publications

References 35 publications

Phonetic evidence on phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Sibilant voicing in Quito Spanish

Phonetic evidence on phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Sibilant voicing in Quito Spanish

Cyclicity

Obstruent voicing before sonorants. The case of West-Flemish

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