The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is pleased to welcome Miquel Simonet (University of Arizona), who will give a talk on Friday, Sept 11 at 12:00pm in the Spanish & Portuguese Library (Dwinelle 5125). The talk is titled “Vowel sandhi processes in Catalan and Spanish: Investigating the phonetics-phonology interface.”
Abstract: This presentation reports on the findings of three acoustic-phonetic studies examining the production of vowel sequences across word boundaries in Spanish and Catalan. The first two studies focus on Spanish and investigate the realization of the vowel sequences /ea/, /ae/, /eo/, and /oe/ across words, as in casa enorme and mono enano. The first project examines Castilian Spanish, the variety spoken in north-central Spain, while the second analyzes Southern Arizona Spanish. Traditional impressionistic descriptions have proposed differences in the phonetic realization of these sequences across the two varieties. A central goal of these studies is to determine whether such descriptions accurately reflect the acoustic-phonetic facts. The third study focuses on Majorcan Catalan, specifically the realization of stressed {/i a u/} + schwa sequences across word boundaries, as in argentí elegant and català enigmàtic. Impressionistic phonological accounts assume that the schwa is categorically deleted in these contexts, leaving only phonetic traces associated with the following vowel. Using acoustic evidence, this study evaluates the validity of these claims. Across the three projects, I ask whether impressionistic phonetic descriptions, used in subsequent phonological analyses, are corroborated by instrumental phonetic data. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for our understanding of phonologization and of the phonetics-phonology interface.