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Article
Voiced stop deletion in Caracas speech: A sociolinguistic analysis of intervocalic /b d ɡ/
Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers (IULCWP) (2014)
  • Avizia Yim Long, Indiana University - Bloomington
Abstract
This paper reports on an investigation of the sociolinguistic behavior of intervocalic /g/ deletion in the speech of Caracas natives and the extent to which the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors conditioning variation of this segment patterns with findings previously reported for intervocalic /b/ (Long & Baldwin, 2013) and /d/ (Díaz-Campos, Fafulas, & Gradoville, 2011; Díaz-Campos & Gradoville, 2011) for speakers of the same corpus. The corpus comprised 36 sociolinguistic interviews equally distributed by age (14-29, 30-45, 61+ years), socioeconomic level (upper, middle, lower) and sex. Analysis and coding of 1,746 tokens revealed that retention was the most frequent variant observed. A logistic regression analysis revealed that age was most influential variable in the selection of a deleted variant, followed by word position, stress, and speaker sex. Findings from the comparative analysis of /g/ with /b/ and /d/ revealed more differences than similarities in the characterization of intervocalic voiced stop deletion for the community of speakers under study. In addition to an examination of the scope of voiced stop deletion in Caracas speech, this paper offers a comparison of the sociolinguistic behavior observed with another dialect of Spanish where data on each segment is available (cf. Poblete, 1995).
Keywords
  • sociolinguistics,
  • phonological variation,
  • intervocalic stops,
  • Spanish
Publication Date
2014
Citation Information
Avizia Yim Long. "Voiced stop deletion in Caracas speech: A sociolinguistic analysis of intervocalic /b d ɡ/" Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers (IULCWP) Vol. 14 Iss. 2 (2014)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/avizia-long/24/