Final devoicing and deletion of /-d/ in Castilian Spanish

José Ignacio Hualde; Christopher D. Eager

doi:10.1515/shll-2016-0014

Article

Final devoicing and deletion of /-d/ in Castilian Spanish

José Ignacio Hualde and Christopher D. Eager

Published/Copyright: September 13, 2016

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From the journal Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Volume 9 Issue 2

Abstract

In the Spanish of north-western Spain, word-final /-d/ shows a remarkable variety of phonetic outcomes. Its possible realizations include voiced approximants, voiceless fricatives and voiced and voiceless plosives, in addition to the deletion of the segment. Here we examine this complex pattern of allophony in a corpus of conversational speech, focusing on the effect of the following phonological context. The results show that most commonly /-d/ is either deleted or realized as a voiceless fricative. Voiceless fricatives are found in all phrasal contexts, but with significantly higher frequency before pause than before a vowel, which is consistent with the hypothesis of diachronic extension of the devoicing from the former context to the latter. The devoicing of /-d/ is neutralizing. Voiceless fricative realizations of /-d/ do not differ from those of phonemic /-θ/ either in amount of voicing or in duration. This implies that deletion and devoicing represent two alternative patterns of reduction starting from [ð], since phonemic /-θ/ is not subject to deletion. Whereas the deletion of /-d/ has lexical exceptions, its devoicing does not. Among the majority of /d/-final words, for which deletion is possible, the relative frequency with which they undergo deletion vs. devoicing appears to vary substantially depending on the specific lexical item. That is, both position in phrase and lexical identity probabilistically determine the realization of /-d/. In addition to contributing to our understanding of the synchronic and diachronic phonology of word-final obstruents in Spanish, we consider the extent to which these data, showing variable word-final devoicing, may help us understand the historical evolution of the crosslinguistically common phenomenon of systematic word-final devoicing.

Keywords: final devoicing; consonant deletion; sound change; allophony; Spanish phonology

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Sarah Little for help with the segmentation and coding of the tokens, Joe Roy for statistical advice, and three anonymous reviewers for this journal for their very helpful comments.

Appendix

Table 10:

Number of tokens by speaker.

Final /d/ tokens (n = 574)
Speaker	Count	Speaker	Count
f19s	19	m09a	29
f23s	49	m10a	24
f24s	23	m17s	55
f29s	52	m18s	33
f31s	15	m20s	13
f33s	50	m25s	18
f34s	25	m26s	24
f35s	38	m27s	34
f36s	20	m28s	23
		m30s	22
		m32s	8

Table 11:

Lexical items and number of tokens. The number of tokens in CREA (subcorpus: Oral, Spain) for each word is also shown.

/-d/						/-θ/
Word	Count	CREA	Word	Count	CREA	Word	Count	CREA
actividad	3	224	posibilidad	4	357	capaz	1	219
casualidad	1	76	realidad	2	751	diez	49	1,325
ciudad	145	661	solicitud	23	19	vez	29	3,286
comodidad	2	41	tened	6	2
David	2	120	tranquilidad	1	138
facultad	13	80	universidad	61	387
longitude	1	26	usted	87	5,332
Madrid	120	3,148	utilidad	1	19
mitad	2	347	Valladolid	7	88
necesidad	1	249	verdad	91	3,626
oportunidad	1	220

Figure 5:

Example of deleted token of /-d/: verdad es. The yellow line on the spectrogram is the intensity curve.

Figure 6:

Example of fricative token of /-d/: facultad es.

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Published Online: 2016-9-13

Published in Print: 2016-9-1

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https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2016-0014

Keywords for this article

final devoicing; consonant deletion; sound change; allophony; Spanish phonology