<OT> New Posting: ROA-640

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ROA 640-0104

Contrast Maintenance in Dominican Spanish Rhotics

Travis G. Bradley <tgbradley at ucdavis.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=640


Abstract:
In Dominican Spanish, consonantal reduction in the syllable
rhyme is so pervasive that /s/ is systematically absent
from this position. Some speakers often attempt to emulate
more conservative styles by reinserting /s/ in the syllable
rhyme, but the result is frequently hypercorrect in that
the fricative either fails to match the position of etymological
/s/ or altogether lacks a corresponding /s/ in the conservative
lexical item. Interestingly, hypercorrect /s/ never appears
before an intervocalic tap or trill. Núñez Cedeño (1988,
1989, 1994) argues that this restriction lends support to
the standard generative analysis of Spanish rhotics as proposed
by Harris (1983) in which the tap is the only underlying
rhotic phoneme, and the intervocalic surface trill is derived
from a heterosyllabic geminate tap. On the assumption that
/s/-epenthesis is a structure-preserving rule, its application
is blocked (a) before the geminate tap in order to maintain
geminate integrity, and (b) before the singleton tap in
order to avoid altering the phonological specification of
an adjacent segment. The explanation crucially depends on
the geminate representation and the existence of a independent
rule of postconsonantal rhotic strengthening.


This paper reconsiders the issue of rhotic representation
in light of the Dominican hypercorrection facts. First,
I show how Padgett's (2003) analysis of Catalan and Spanish
rhotics, cast within a recent version of Dispersion Theory
(Flemming 1995, 2002), offers a simpler account of the behavior
of syllable-initial rhotics and does not require stipulations
on the input representation of rhotic contrast, effectively
handling the possibility of singleton trills. Second, I
develop a constraint-based account of hypercorrective /s/-epenthe
sis in which the appearance of this non-underlying segment
is driven by a high-ranking output-output correspondence
constraint. According to this approach, Dominican speakers
attempt to reestablish in their own outputs a phonotactic
generalization about the shape of conservative Spanish outputs,
namely that postnuclear [s] can appear in the syllable rhyme.
Since epenthesis is driven by a type of faithfulness constraint,
this analysis avoids the incorrect prediction that a constraint-b
ased approach seems to make with respect to the insertion
of non-underlying material, namely that markedness constraints
will always favor insertion of the least marked segment
in the language (Vaux 2001, 2002). Finally, I argue that
the emergence of hypercorrect /s/ is curtailed in those
surface contexts in which its presence would jeopardize
other phonological contrasts in the system, and I show how
this already follows from Padgett's (2003) Dispersion-theoretic
analysis. Since restrictions on epenthesis are explained
independently of any assumptions about the underlying representat
ion of rhotic contrast, the Dominican Spanish hypercorrection
facts no longer constitute as strong an argument in favor
of the geminate representation of the trill.

Comments: 
Keywords: Spanish, rhotics, Dispersion Theory, systemic contrast, hypercorrection, consonantal epenthesis, output-output correspondence
Areas: Phonology
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=640