The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics

Rhotic Variation in Costa Rican Spanish

“…Assuming that the trill patterns with obstruents and is minimally sonorous, and that the tap patterns with glides, they suggest rules that prefer large sonority jumps syllable-initially, and small sonority falls syllable-finally, yielding the distribution shown in While the sonority approach provides more explanatory power than traditional SPE approaches, neither is free from problems. Particularly, while both SPE and sonority approaches can explain the distribution in standard Spanish, they fail to account for the considerable variation across dialects which, in some cases, appears to be replacing canonical productions with innovative realizations (LIPSKI, 2012;CAMPOS-ASTORKIA, 2012). Among the phonological contexts mentioned above, rhotics in consonant clusters in onset position demonstrate considerable variation.…”

“…It is well documented that the diverse class of sounds classified under the umbrella term "rhotic" demonstrate considerable variability across languages, dialects, and speech styles (BRADLEY, 2006). This is no exception in Spanish, where rhotics have received considerable attention, both because of their questionable phonemic status and variable phonetic realizations (HUALDE, 2004;LIPSKI, 2012). Among dialects of Spanish, the pronunciation of rhotics in Costa Rican Spanish 1 is a highly salient feature of this variety, where the standard alveolar trill /r/ and alveolar tap /ɾ/ are often assibilated or realized as fricatives.…”

Applied arguments in Spanish inchoative middle constructions

“…These right-dislocated arguments are generally interpreted as sentential afterthoughts and are therefore subject to particular information structure conditions (cf. Fernández Sánchez 2017;López 2009;Olarrea 2012;Samek-Lodovici 2015;Villalba 2010). 45 For the sake of simplification, I only provide the derivation of the dative DP's affected interpretation, i.e.…”