Abstract
This paper examines the glottal stop in word-final position as a variant of /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish. Previous research (Tellado González 2007; Valentín-Márquez 2006) generally focused on the glottal stop in word-final position between vowels (e.g., /las alas/ ‘the wings’). In this paper, we investigate the glottal stop not only in this context, but also in word-final position when preceded by a vowel and followed by a consonant (e.g., /los takos/ ‘the tacos’), and in word-final position when preceded by a vowel and followed by a pause (e.g., /los takos#/ ‘the tacos’). Specifically, the effects of following segment, stress of the following syllable, gender, age, and English use and proficiency on glottal stop production were investigated. The data came from sociolinguistic interviews with 19 participants (8 female, 11 male; Age range: 18–63 years) from San Juan, Carolina, and Guaynabo. The results showed that the glottal stop occurred not only between vowels, but also when followed by a consonant or a pause. Additionally, the glottal stop appeared significantly more before stressed syllables. There were no significant effects of age or gender. Although the effects of English use and proficiency were not significant, we discuss the potential role that contact with English may play in glottalization rates.
Funding source: Ada Belle Winthrop King Institute Summer Research
References
Beardsley, Theodore S. 2004. American English loanwords in Puerto Rican Spanish. Word 55(1). 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2004.11432540.Search in Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & David Weenink. 2018. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.39. Available at: http://www.praat.org/ (retrieved May 25 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Büdenbender, Eva Maria S. 2013. Te conozco, bacalao: Investigating the influence of social stereotypes on linguistic attitudes. Hispania 96. 110–134. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpn.2013.0031.Search in Google Scholar
Canfield, D. Lincoln. 1981. Spanish pronunciation in the Americas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Carvalho, Ana Maria. 2006. Spanish (s) aspiration as a prestige marker on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border. Spanish in Context 3(1). 85–114. https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.3.1.07car.Search in Google Scholar
Chappell, Whitney. 2013. Social and linguistic factors conditioning the glottal stop in Nicaraguan Spanish. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Chappell, Whitney. 2014. Reanalysis and hypercorrection among extreme /s/ reducers. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20(2). 29–40.Search in Google Scholar
Chappell, Whitney. 2015a. Linguistic factors conditioning glottal constriction in Nicaraguan Spanish. Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di Linguistica 27(2). 1–42.Search in Google Scholar
Chappell, Whitney. 2015b. Formality strategies in Managua, Nicaragua: A local vs. global approach. Spanish in Context 12(2). 221–254. https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.12.2.03cha.Search in Google Scholar
Chappell, Whitney. 2018. The importance of motivated comparisons in variationist studies. In Jonathan E. MacDonald (ed.), Contemporary trends in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015, 143–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/ihll.15.08chaSearch in Google Scholar
Colina, S. 2012. Syllable structure. In José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea & Erin O’Rourke (eds.), The handbook of Hispanic linguistics, 133–152. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.10.1002/9781118228098.ch7Search in Google Scholar
Duany, Jorge. 2005. Dominican migration to Puerto Rico: A transnational perspective. Centro Journal 17. 243–268.Search in Google Scholar
González, Carolina & Christine Weissglass. 2017. Hiatus resolution in L1 and L2 Spanish: An optimality account. In Ruth E. V. Lopes, Juanito Ornelas de Avelar & Sonia Maria Lazzarino Cyrino (eds.), Romance languages and linguistics theory 12. Selected papers from the 45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), 79–95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/rllt.12.06gonSearch in Google Scholar
Hualde, José Ignacio. 2014. Los sonidos del español. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511719943Search in Google Scholar
Humberto, López-Morales. 1992. El español del Caribe. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE.Search in Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel E. 2019. Rbrul version 3.1.1. Available at: http://www.danielezrajohnson.com/rbrul.html (retrieved May 25 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. The social motivation of sound change. Word 19(33). 273–309.10.1080/00437956.1963.11659799Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1990. The Intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2. 205–254. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500000338.Search in Google Scholar
Lipski, John. 1984. On the weakening of /s/ in Latin American Spanish. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 51(1). 31–43.Search in Google Scholar
Lipski, John. 1994. Latin American Spanish. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Lipski, John. 2001. The place of Chabacano in the Philippine linguistic identity. Estudios de Sociolingüística 2. 119–163. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v2i2.119.Search in Google Scholar
Lipski, John. 2008. Varieties of Spanish in the U.S. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.10.1353/book13059Search in Google Scholar
Lipski, John. 2011. Socio-phonological variation in Latin American Spanish. In Manuel Díaz Campos (ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics, 72–146. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.10.1002/9781444393446.ch4Search in Google Scholar
Lope Blanch, Juan M. 1987. Estudios sobre el español de Yucatán. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.Search in Google Scholar
Michnowicz, Jim & Laura Kagan. 2016. On glottal stops in Yucatan Spanish: Language contact and dialect standardization. In Sandro Sessarego & Fernando Tejedo (eds.), Spanish language and sociolinguistic analysis, 217–240. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/ihll.8.09micSearch in Google Scholar
Michnowicz, Jim. 2007. El habla de Yucatám: Final [m] in a dialect in contact. In Jonathan Holmquist (ed.), Selected proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS3), 38–43. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.Search in Google Scholar
Mohamed, Sherez, Carolina González & Antje Muntendam. 2019. Arabic-Spanish language contact in Puerto Rico: A case of glottal stop epenthesis. Languages 4(4). 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4040093.Search in Google Scholar
Morales, Amparo. 2001. Anglicismos puertorriqueños. San Juan, PR: Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española.Search in Google Scholar
Sanicky, Christina. 1989. Las vocales en contacto en el habla de Misiones, Argentina. Hispania, 72(3), 700–704. https://doi.org/10.2307/343529.Search in Google Scholar
Sloetjes, Han & Peter Wittenburg. 2008. ELAN (Version 5.0.0-beta) [Computer software]. Nijmegen, the Netherlands: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (2017, April 18).Search in Google Scholar
Tellado González, Judith. 2007. Variación alofónica de /s/ implosiva en el español de Puerto Rico: El fenómeno de la oclusión glottal. San Juan, PR: University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Terrell, Tracy. 1977. Constraints on aspiration and deletion of final /s/ in Cuban and Puerto Rican Spanish. Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 4. 35–51.Search in Google Scholar
Terrell, Tracy. 1978. La aspiración y elisión de /s/ en el español de Puerto Rico. Anuario de Letras 16. 41–66.10.24201/nrfh.v27i1.1705Search in Google Scholar
Thomason, Sarah G. & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520912793Search in Google Scholar
Thon, Sonia. 1989. The glottal stop in the Spanish spoken in Corrientes, Argentina. Hispanic Linguistics 3(1–2). 199–218.Search in Google Scholar
Trawick, Sonya & Jim Michnowicz. 2019. Glottal insertion before vowel-initial words in the Spanish of Asunción, Paraguay. In Gregory Thompson & Scott Alvord (eds.), Contact, community, and connections: Current approaches to Spanish in multilingual populations, 147–174. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.Search in Google Scholar
Valentín-Márquez, Wilfredo. 2006. La oclusión glotal y la construcción lingüística de identidades sociales en Puerto Rico. In Nuria Sagarra & Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (eds.), Selected proceedings of the 9th Hispanic linguistics symposium, 326–341. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Search in Google Scholar
Zentella, Ana C. 1982. Spanish and English in contact in the United States: The Puerto Rican experience. Word 33(1–2). 41–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1982.11435721.Search in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Nominal predication with estar
- A distinctness approach to clitic combinations in Romance
- Mirativity as Expressive Meaning: The Case of adiós
- The Internal Structure of Perfective Adjectives: States and Blocking
- L2 Acquisition of Spanish VOT by English-Speaking Immigrants in Spain
- The Use of the Glottal Stop as a Variant of /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish
- On the Gradient Lenition of Spanish Voiced Obstruents: A Look at Onset Clusters
- On the Contrasts Between sí ‘yes’ and sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish and the Structure of the Complementizer Phrase Domain
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Nominal predication with estar
- A distinctness approach to clitic combinations in Romance
- Mirativity as Expressive Meaning: The Case of adiós
- The Internal Structure of Perfective Adjectives: States and Blocking
- L2 Acquisition of Spanish VOT by English-Speaking Immigrants in Spain
- The Use of the Glottal Stop as a Variant of /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish
- On the Gradient Lenition of Spanish Voiced Obstruents: A Look at Onset Clusters
- On the Contrasts Between sí ‘yes’ and sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish and the Structure of the Complementizer Phrase Domain