This thesis undertakes a comprehensive examination of the effects of a variety of social, phonological and morphosyntactic factors on the process of s-weakening in the Spanish of San Miguel, El Salvador. The corpus used in this study consists of sixteen speakers native to San Miguel, evenly distributed according to age, sex and socioeconomic status. It was found that s-weakening appears to be in stable variation and that it is primarily governed by phonological factors: the quality of the segment following the /s/, the position of the /s/ in the syllable and word, and whether the /s/ is in a stressed or an unstressed syllable. Regarding the quality of the following segments, it was found that coronal stops caused /s/ to resist weakening. Consequently, it is argued that /st/ and /sd/ sequences are partial geminates in this dialect of Spanish, i.e. they share a place node. An account of the phonological factors conditioning s-weakening is provided within the framework of Optimality Theory, utilising the notion of crucially unranked constraints.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.26710 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Taler, Vanessa. |
| Contributors | Auger, Julie (advisor), Goad, Heather (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Linguistics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001572625, proquestno: MQ29516, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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