El foco, la estructura informativa y ser focalizador en el español cibaeño

In this manuscript, I examine information focus and contrastive focus in Cibaeño Dominican Spanish (CDS), in an attempt to test the predictions of Zubizarreta (1998) as well as claims of rigid word order (e.g. Cameron, 1993; Toribio, 2000). Analysis of the experimental results from 34 monolingual CDS speakers suggests that CDS does not behave according to Zubizarreta's proposal, nor does it have rigid word order. Additionally, the preference for in situ contrastive-corrective focus bears a potential for information-structure-related ambiguities. I suggest that the ser focalizador structure, which is exhaustive in CDS, is made available to resolve such cases of ambiguity. Novel ser focalizador data informs a revised syntactic analysis of the structure based on Toribio (1993).

Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish

Spanish dialectology observes that dialects with a preference for velarized variants of /n/ (e.g. Caribbean dialects) include nasalized vocalic allophones in their inventory. Instrumental cross-dialectal comparisons of Spanish anticipatory nasalization, however, remain surprisingly rare. To this end, I compare the time-course of nasality in pre-nasal vowels in Argentine and Dominican Spanish, as well as across a number of linguistic variables described in the phonetic, sociolinguistic and historical literature. Twenty-eight speakers from Santo Domingo and twenty-six from Buenos Aires were recorded with a nasometer, an ideal instrument for data collection in the field. Measurements of nasal energy were extracted to acoustically characterize the time-course of nasality. Results indicate that Dominican speakers present more extensive anticipatory vowel nasalization than Argentine speakers. These findings are consistent with observations of allophonic nasalization (i.e. phonologized) in the Caribbean dialect under study, Dominican Spanish. Regarding the linguistic variables, stressed pre-nasal vowels showed earlier onset of nasalization, particularly among the Caribbean speakers, which further provides support for the phonological differences in vowel nasality.

Short-term accommodation as a function of addressee language proficiency

This paper examines patterns of phonetic accommodation as a function of addressee target language proficiency. Specifically, it analyzes short-term adjustments in the articulation of coda consonants /s/, /ɾ/, and /n/ in the speech of eight New York Dominican Spanish speakers during a series of conversations with different addressees – a native speaker and three nonnative Spanish speakers who have varying levels of Spanish proficiency. Results demonstrate that addressee native-speaker status and proficiency play a statistically significant role in both the degree and direction of phonetic accommodation exhibited by the native speaker informants. While the informants converge with both the most- and least-proficient addressees, they initially diverge from the mid-proficient addressee. The study finds that the native speaker informants use overtly-prestigious variants to attune to the academic Spanish of the most-proficient addressees and use covertly-prestigious, emblematic variants with both the mid-proficient and native speaker addressees to demonstrate outgroup and ingroup membership, respectively.

TP-internal focus and dialectal variation: the case of the Focalizing Ser

This study examines patterns of variation in the perception of the Focalizing Ser (FS) structure by speakers of Colombian Spanish. The FS occurs alongside the standard pseudo-cleft construction and it has been reported in only a few Spanish dialects. We discuss data collected from 371 participants living in five Colombian cities (Barranquilla, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cali, and Medellín). The results of two acceptability judgment tests (128 sentences tested in both audio and written formats) confirm that FS is an acceptable structure and indicate similar acceptability tendencies across the country: Prepositional Phrases, Complementizer/Inflectional Phrases, and Complex Verbal Phrases are the most accepted FS-focused sentence types, whereas Sentence-Final FS is the least accepted. A comparison of these results with those obtained from our previous study in the Dominican Republic [Méndez Vallejo, D. Catalina. 2015a. Changing the focus: An empirical study of “Focalizing ser” (‘to be’) in Dominican Spanish. Isogloss 1/1. 67–93.] show some analogous tendencies even across macro-varieties.

Word Order and Nanosyntax

This chapter explores how the size of stored exponents can account for word order facts in the nanosyntactic framework. Three Spanish varieties are considered; these varieties differ in the availability of preverbal subjects in interrogative sentences. The most restrictive one, European Spanish, disallows them all; Mérida (Venezuela) Spanish allows some under restrictive conditions, whereas Dominican Spanish allows them all. It is argued that the differences follow from the size of the subject agreement exponent and, crucially, whether it is the element that spells out the interrogative force of the sentence: The smaller the stored exponent is, the more available preverbal subjects in interrogative sentences are.