Chapter published in:
Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015
Edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15] 2018
► pp. 95–120

The simultaneous lenition of Spanish /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ as a chain shift in progress

| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This study examines dialect differences in the simultaneous lenition of intervocalic /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ in Peruvian Spanish in Lima and Cuzco. Results from a read speech task show both sets of plosives are lenited significantly less in Cuzco than in Lima. Random forests demonstrate that differences in voicing best explain the distinction between /ptk/ and /bdɡ/, that differences in relative intensity best explain the distinction in Lima, and that in order to best distinguish Cuzco /bdɡ/ from Lima /ptk/, relative intensity must be given more importance than voicing. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that these lenitions constitute a chain shift in progress and offer insight into how these shifts may occur.
Keywords: phonetics, plosive lenition, chain shift, dialect differences, Spanish
Published online: 14 February 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.06eag
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