The status of s in Dominican Spanish

Abstract

Theoretical linguistic treatments of the intrusive-s of popular Dominican Spanish (yo[s] tuve < yo tuve 'I had') assume the hypothesis that illiterate speakers have reanalyzed their phonologies so that lexical items no longer contain any trace of coda-s. As a consequence, illiterate speakers are said to restore an s into random syllable codas in an attempt to hypercorrect to a more elevated style. Using natural data gathered from sociolinguistic interviews with Dominicans of diverse literacy levels, we demonstrate that the phonological characterization of intrusive-s in the theoretical literature is incorrect and the hypothesis that illiterate speakers lack etymological /s/ is also shown to be flawed. Instead, the results of a quantitative analysis demonstrate that, despite high rates of s-deletion, overtly manifested s usually corresponds to etymological-s. Intrusive-s arises relatively rarely in our corpus and it appears from this data that lexical and intrusive-s might have distinct linguistic distributions and they may differ in what they mark socially.

Variation in Spanish /s/: Overview and New Perspectives

“…It also tends to emerge in more formal situations (Morgan 1998). Additionally, voiceless stops (p, t, k) act as attractors for intrusive-s across word boundaries (Bullock et al 2014). Although semiliterate Dominican speakers seem to know where the /s/ belongs, they choose to express s-insertion for reasons of identity, social prestige, and discursive functions.…”

“…Previous findings on Dominican Spanish have reported that the aspirated variant [h] is almost non-existent, and that the deleted one is, by far, the most frequent one in adult speech (see Bullock et al 2014;Terrell 1986). While aspiration of /s/ was attested in the 1920s and 1930s (Henríquez-Ureña 1940), today, deletion is well advanced, especially among younger speakers (Jiménez Sabater 1975).…”

Children’s and adults’ eye movements and the extraction of number information from ambiguous and unambiguous markings

“…noun, determiner, adjective), phonological context (e.g. following sound), gender, SES, and speech style (Bullock et al, 2014;Cepeda, 1995;Lipski, 1994;Miller, 2013;Miller & Cardenas, 2020;Miller & Schmitt, 2012;Poplack, 1980), and Spanish /s/ lenition is prevalent in child-directed speech (Miller, 2007(Miller, , 2013Miller & Cardenas, 2020). When the plural marker /-s/ is omitted, the plural noun may be semantically ambiguous as illustrated for bold forms in (5).…”

Entrenchment effects in language change.

“…In the same vein, apparent cases of hypercorrection may in fact be or have become functionally constrained (e.g. Labov & Harris 1986: 13-17; Bullock et al 2014). 8 At that point, their occurrence no longer depends on automatic substitution of a vernacular form for a more prestigious form.…”

“…Although hypercorrection relies on automated paradigmatic relations, its output may always go on to lead a life of its own, as a stored chunk (see Section 4.4). In the same vein, apparent cases of hypercorrection may in fact be or have become functionally constrained (e.g., Bullock, Toribio, & Amengual, 2014;Labov & Harris, 1986, pp. 13-17).…”