Lexical frequency and s-realization in Barranquilla, Colombia : The role of lexical frequency in the weakening of syllable-final lexical-s in the Spanish of Barranquilla, Colombia

ISBN-13: 9783639121803 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 204 str.

Richard File-Muriel

Opis

This book reports on a quantitative analysis of /s/in words of different lexical frequencies in acohesive speech community. Speakers fromBarranquilla, Colombia between 20-26 years of ageread approximately 100 sentences, containing wordswith s + consonant sequences. These productions weresubmitted to auditory acoustical analysis; visualinspection of spectrograms was carried out forambiguous cases in which the strong sibilance thatcharacterizes /s/ was not clear. The findings revealthat the single most important factor conditionings-realization is lexical frequency. Speakers tendtowards full articulation of /s/ in low-frequencywords, while weakening it in high-frequency words.The importance of this factor becomes more apparentwhen one examines a wider range of the frequencyscale than what is attested in conversational speech. These findings support models of language whichincorporate lexical frequency as a central componentin explaining variations across words in bothindividual and communal grammars.

O autorze

Richard J. File-Muriel was born 9/17/1972 in Normal, Illinois
(USA). At the time he authored this book, the general focus of
his linguistic research was phonetic and phonological variation
and change, primarily of a segmental nature. He and his wife live
between Colombia and the United States.