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Salazar-Dawes, A.

English

This thesis consists of six chapters, five of which deal with a
particular aspect of the phonetics and phonology of Caracas (Venezuela)
Spanish. They are all tied together in a concern for the experimental
investigation of certain consonantal developments that are taking place in this
variety of the language, specifically the weakening and deletion of /s/.

Chapter 1 gives a general outline of the segmental phonological
system of Caracas Spanish. Chapter 2 provides an analysis of the syllable
structure in an attempt to explain weakening and deletion whose domain
seems to be circuscribed to the syllable. Chapter 3 deals in particular with
the different realizations of /s/, as the result of the weakening and deletion
processes. A review of the literature is also provided. Chapter 4 attempts to
look into the perception of plurality. This notion is marked in the language by
several means: inflectionally, semantically and syntactically. Two experiments
(one of them a pilot) are reported in which listeners were asked to identify
plurality in words presented both in isolation and in context. My main
concern was to find out whether the listener was able to perceive the notion
of plurality when presented with the different realizations of /s/ as plural
markers. It was found that the inflected plural marker was more perceptually
salient than other suffixal markers, also, more misperceptions occurred in
isolated words than in context bound words. This supports the hypothesis
that the notion of plurality is perceived when there is a good deal of
phonemic/phonetic information and in its absence semantic, syntactic cues
are available to the listener for his recovering of the information. In chapter 5
two experiments are reported. The first one is concerned with vowel duration
and the second with vowel formant frequency. The aim of these experiments
was to find out whether duration and /or formant frequency can be taken as
acoustic correlates of plurality in Caracas Spanish. It was found that there is
a relationship between morphological functions and both duration and formant
frequency changes which seems to support the prediction of a morphological
restructuring in Caracas Spanish. Chapter 6 presents the conclusions drawn
from the the relevant findings of the previous chapters

The realizations of final 's' in Caracas Spanish : An experimental study.

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