Realizations of final 's' in Caracas Spanish: an experimental study

Abstract

This thesis consists of six chapters, five of which deal with a particular aspect of the phonetics and phonology of Caracas (Venezuela) Spanish. They are all tied together in a concern for the experimental investigation of certain consonantal developments that are taking place in this variety of the language, specifically the weakening and deletion of /s/.

Chapter 1 gives a general outline of the segmental phonological system of Caracas Spanish. Chapter 2 provides an analysis of the syllable structure in an attempt to explain weakening and deletion whose domain seems to be circuscribed to the syllable. Chapter 3 deals in particular with the different realizations of /s/, as the result of the weakening and deletion processes. A review of the literature is also provided. Chapter 4 attempts to look into the perception of plurality. This notion is marked in the language by several means: inflectionally, semantically and syntactically. Two experiments (one of them a pilot) are reported in which listeners were asked to identify plurality in words presented both in isolation and in context. My main concern was to find out whether the listener was able to perceive the notion of plurality when presented with the different realizations of /s/ as plural markers. It was found that the inflected plural marker was more perceptually salient than other suffixal markers, also, more misperceptions occurred in isolated words than in context bound words. This supports the hypothesis that the notion of plurality is perceived when there is a good deal of phonemic/phonetic information and in its absence semantic, syntactic cues are available to the listener for his recovering of the information. In chapter 5 two experiments are reported. The first one is concerned with vowel duration and the second with vowel formant frequency. The aim of these experiments was to find out whether duration and /or formant frequency can be taken as acoustic correlates of plurality in Caracas Spanish. It was found that there is a relationship between morphological functions and both duration and formant frequency changes which seems to support the prediction of a morphological restructuring in Caracas Spanish. Chapter 6 presents the conclusions drawn from the the relevant findings of the previous chapters.