José Ignacio Hualde

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

In this study we examine the effects of word boundaries on the lenition of intervocalic voiceless plosives in Catalan in order to test the role of phonological contrastiveness in phonetic processes. Here we test the hypothesis that word-final intervocalic voiceless plosives (VC#V) will show greater lenition than word-internal and word-initial inter...

The notion of marginal contrasts and other gradient relations challenges the classification of phones as either contrastive phonemes or allophones of the same phoneme. The existence of “fuzzy” or “intermediate” contrasts has implications for language acquisition and sound change. In this research, we examine production and perception of two margina...

The goal of this paper is to investigate the effects of intonational differences across Basque varieties. We have chosen three Markina Basque contours as stimuli in a perception experiment: those that are used in declaratives, yes-no questions and verum focus sentences. Stimuli include both natural and manipulated contours. Three participant groups...

This Illustration of the IPA describes the sound system of the local dialect of Basque ( euskara , euskera , IS0-639-3 eus) spoken in the town of Markina-Xemein, in the province of Bizkaia (Biscay), within the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain (see maps in Figures 1 and 2. Speakers of this local variety of Basque refer to it as markiñarra or Mar...

In Basque word-final stop consonants have very low lexical frequency, but very high token frequency in discourse, since final /-t/ and /-k/ appear in very common suffixes. Here we undertake an acoustic investigation of the phonetic realization of word-final stops, with a focus on consonant clusters that arise across word boundaries. Our analysis is...

Diphthongs have a dynamic formant structure. Nevertheless, many quantitative studies of diphthongs are based on measurements at only two points, somewhere in the nucleus and somewhere in the glide. The question arises as to whether analyses based on values at only two points provide an adequate understanding of the dynamics of diphthongs. Wieling (...

In this article, we examine some aspects of the interaction between Standard Basque (see also Jauregi & Epelde in LME 2019) and traditional varieties of the Basque language. The questions that arise in this context are, on the one hand, the possible “substrate” effects of local varieties on the pronunciation of Standard Basque, so that Standard Bas...

Reconstruction of Old Common Basque accentual system

Basque has a phonological contrast between voiceless /ptk/ and voiced /bdg/ in onset position. Word-finally there is only /t/ and /k/. These word-final consonants, although rare stem-finally, have great textual frequency, since they are found in several frequent inflectional suffixes. We examine the realization of final /t k/ before a vowel across...

Although the syllabification of sequences of two vocoids in Spanish is generally predictable from vowel height and stress, there are exceptions to the general rules. There is also variation among speakers in this respect, so that this is a 'fuzzy' contrast. Here we report on an experiment on the production of this contrast, analyzing data from a mu...

This study tests the influence of acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors on listeners' perception of prominence in three languages whose prominence systems differ in the phonological patterning of prominence and in the association of prominence with information structure-English, French and Spanish. Native speakers of each language perfo...

Lan honetan, gaztelaniak eta beste hizkuntza ibero-erromanikoek euskaratik hartu omen dituzten mailegu zaharren kronologia aztertzen dut. Mailegu hauen datazioa errazagoa edo seguruagoa da soinu aldakuntzen ondorioak erakusten dituztenean eta soinu aldakuntza horiek datatu ditzakegunean. Hemen Erdi Aroko Miecha praenomen-az dihardut. Antza denez, h...

Lan honetan Lekeitioko hizkeran menpeko perpausetako azentu nagusia non kokatzen den aztertzen dugu, asimetria interesgarri bat erakutsiz. -ela perpaus barruan dagoen aditzaren aurreko hitz azentugabeak foku azentua jaso dezakeen bitartean, -en, -enean, -enétik, -elako perpaus barrukoak ezin du azentua eraman. Enpirikoki baieztatu dugu kontrastea g...

Mitxelenak argitaratu gabe utzitako langaien artean grabaketa bat dugu. Grabaketaren helburua azentu bereizkuntzak aztertzea zen. Azterketa hori egiteko, Mitxelenak Oiartzungo hiztun bat elkarrizketatu zuen. Hemen grabaketan agertzen diren azentu patroiak miatzen ditugu eta Mitxelenak egindako sailkapenarekin elkartzen ditugu. Ondorio nagusia da or...

Basque dialects differ substantially in their accentual properties. Previous work has focused mainly on phonological aspects of this prosodic diversity, such as the systems of rules for accent assignment. Less attention has been paid to variation in the acoustic realization of word-accent. Here we examine the realization of lexical accentual promin...

Basque dialects differ substantially in their accentual properties. Previous work has focused mainly on phonological aspects of this prosodic diversity, such as the systems of rules for accent assignment. Less attention has been paid to variation in the acoustic realization of word-accent. Here we examine the realization of lexical accentual promin...

The distribution of aspiration in Basque — with ‘aspiration’ referring to both the occurrence of [h] and of aspirated stops — shows some puzzling aspects. In some words, aspiration is ancient, in the sense that it must be assumed for the earliest reconstructable stage. In some other instances, however, it has arisen seemingly ex nihilo, as can be o...

Artikulu honetan gaurko euskararen kontsonanteen banaketan eragin berezia izan duten prozesu diakroniko nagusien kronologia miatzen dugu. Bereziki hurrengo kontsonanteen bilakaera aztertzen dugu: hitz-hasierako herskari ahoskabe eta ahostunak, herskari hasperendunak, afrikatuak, frikari glotal sudurkaria, eta ozen + /h/ bilkurak.

In some North American English varieties the diphthong /aɪ/ has developed a distinctively higher nucleus before voiceless consonants and also before a flapped /t/. The phenomenon is known as Canadian Raising, as it was first described for Canadian English. We report on variation in the production and perception of this distinction in a group of fem...

We trace the evolution of two causal conjunctions of temporal origin in Catalan, pus (que) ‘since’ (later puix (que)), which ultimately derives from Latin post ‘after,’ and ja que ‘since,’ ultimately from iam ‘already.’ We focus on the different causal meanings that these connectors may express at different stages. The analysis of our Catalan corpu...

Here we examine the substrate influence of local Basque varieties on Standard Basque prosody. We focus on the singular/plural distinction, which in many traditional varieties is conveyed by differences in accentuation and in Standard Basque, instead, is expressed by differences in the segmental shape of suffixes. The results of our preliminary inve...

We report on an experiment on the acoustic cues of stress in the Basque variety of Azpeitia. We use singular/plural minimal pairs to examine acoustic differences between stressed and unstressed vowels. Both pitch and intensity appear to cue lexical stress. In particular, in the context that we have examined, stressed syllables show a pitch rise. On...

In the Spanish of north-western Spain, word-final /-d/ shows a remarkable variety of phonetic outcomes. Its possible realizations include voiced approximants, voiceless fricatives and voiced and voiceless plosives, in addition to the deletion of the segment. Here we examine this complex pattern of allophony in a corpus of conversational speech, foc...

In this article we present a set of arguments in favor of having access to two levels of prosodic representation, broad phonetic and phonological, and the motivations for developing a set of cross-linguistically transparent and consistent labels (e.g., an International Prosodic Alphabet, IPrA) based on the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework and...

Since Bolinger's [1] discovery that pitch cues accentual prominence in English, a tension has arisen between two strategies: equating accent with pitch excursions and relying on perception for identifying accented words. This paper investigates the relation between prominence judgments from untrained listeners and accentual labels produced by train...

The p honeme /x029D;/ in Spanish is known to have a wide range of phonetic realizations, even within a single dialect. Whereas the influence of different contextual factors in conditioning the allophony of /b d ɡ/ has been the object of much recent acoustic investigation, somewhat surprisingly there are no comparable studies of the voiced palatal o...

Central Catalan ‘prepalatal’ (postalveolar) consonants show a complex phonological distribution. Whereas in word-internal intervocalic position a four-way opposition obtains, involving a contrast in voice and a fricative/affricate distinction, elsewhere at least one of the two oppositions is neutralized. Position in word determines whether affricat...

We investigate the prominence of English words with stress reversal (e.g. èlevátion 2-1 → élevàtion 1-2). We ask what motivates the occurrence of the " early high " (1-2) pattern outside of stress clash contexts, and consider the hypothesis that it marks prominence non-locally. Experiment 1 tests the effect of prominence pattern on memory. Given it...

Affective or expressive palatalization is a phenomenon in Basque whereby certain consonants are replaced by (pre)palatals to create diminutives. Affective palatalization is also found in child-directed speech, where it may have its origin.

We investigate the acquisition of Spanish lexical stress by native speakers of Korean. Korean is a language without lexical stress, where rising tone cues prominence at the phrase-level. Spanish, has lexical stress. In a first experiment, we examined the production of pitch correlates of lexical stress. Our Korean participants’ production was simil...

This paper addresses the question of how synchronic variation in intervocalic voicing of voiceless obstruents, as observed in several languages (e.g., Rome Italian /lato/ [lato] ~ [lado]), may initiate and give rise to a regular sound change (e.g., /t/ > /d/ between vowels). We hypothesize that a biomechanically motivated linkage between male gende...

We offer an acoustic study of variation in the realization of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Catalan and Spanish. We consider the effects of phonological inventory (Catalan has a distinction between /s/and /z/ that Spanish lacks) and position in word (i.e. effects of word boundaries). An analysis of a corpus of Map Task interviews in Catalan a...

In this essay, I examine the causes and consequences of the different views and practices of Basque writers regarding loanwords and language mixture in different historical contexts, from the unconcerned attitude of some early writers, to the radical exclusion of loanwords in the age of purism, to later antipuristic reactions, to more recent concer...

We investigate the realization and discrimination of lexical stress contrasts in pitch-unaccented words in phrase-medial position in Spanish, a context in which intonational pitch accents are frequently absent. Results from production and perception experiments show that in this context durational and intensity cues to stress are produced by speake...

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995)

This second volume contains detailed surveys of the intonational phonology of fourteen typologically diverse languages, described in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Unlike the first volume, half of the languages, which vary in their word prosody as well as their geographic distribution, are understudied languages or researched through fieldwo...

The perception of prosodic structure (phrasal prominences and boundaries) may depend in part on acoustic cues in the speech signal and in part on utterance meaning as related to syntactic structure and discourse context. In this study we ask if listeners are able to differentially weigh acoustic and meaningbased cues to prosody. We test naïve subje...

We examine the realization of word accent contrasts in Standard Latvian and East Aukštaitian Lithuanian across intonational contexts. In our Latvian data the contrast is manifested as level vs. falling pitch in most contexts, in addition to a durational difference. In Aukštaitian Lithuanian, instead, differences in vowel quality and duration cue th...

The lenition of intervocalic consonants is typically phonologized in sound change only within word domains. At first blush, this morphological restriction might seem to contradict the Neogrammarian hypothesis of exclusively phonetic conditioning in sound change. In this paper I examine the weakening of intervocalic voiced stops/affricates in Istanb...

The Spanish voiced obstruents /b d g/ are traditionally described as having each two allophones: stop and fricative (approximant) in complementary distribution. Several researchers have noted that some Central American and Highland Colombian varieties deviate from the general allophonic distribution in showing a preference for stop realizations in...

Are palatal consonants articulated by multiple tongue gestures (coronal and dorsal) or by a single gesture that brings the tongue into contact with the palate at several places of articulation? The lenition of palatal consonants (resulting in approximants) has been presented as evidence that palatals are simple, not complex: When reduced, they do n...

A common feature of public speech in Catalan is the placement of prominence on lexically unstressed syllables ("emphatic stress"). This paper presents an acoustic study of radio speech data. Instances of emphatic stress were perceptually identified. Within-word comparison between vowels with emphatic stress and vowels with primary lexical stress re...

The present study explores the acoustics of /d/ in two corpora of Spanish and Catalan spontaneous speech. Three acoustic metrics were developed as indexes of articulatory weakening. The findings suggest that variations in the implementation of /d/ result from gradient modulations in constriction degree on a unimodal statistical-acoustic distributio...

The term ‘pitch-accent language’ is used in reference to languages like Swedish, where words contrast in the melody associated with the stressed syllable, and it is also applied to languages like Tokyo Japanese, where words have at most one syllable specified as bearing a tonal contour (accent), including an unaccented class. Both types of ‘pitch-a...

This article analyzes the ideological and sociological uses of literal translation in Refranes y Sentencias, an anonymous compilation of Basque proverbs, with Spanish translations, published in 1596. The compilation is published at the moment when Basques vie for influence in the Spanish court, using the alleged purity and antiquity of their langua...

Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2000)

Written entirely in Spanish, this is the ideal introduction to Spanish linguistics for students. Using clear explanations, it covers all the basic concepts required to study the structural aspects of the Spanish language - phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax - as well as the history of Spanish, its dialects and linguistic variation. This...

Definition and functions of stressPatterns of word-level stress in SpanishMetrical structure and stressQuantity-sensitivity and related restrictions in Spanish stress patternsStress in compoundsUnstressed wordsSecondary stressAcoustic correlates of stressSpanish rhythmConclusions References

Reflecting the growth and increasing global importance of the Spanish language, The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics brings together a team of renowned Spanish linguistics scholars to explore both applied and theoretical work in this field. • Features 41 newly-written essays contributed by leading language scholars that shed new light on the growth...

We examine the weakening of intervocalic voiceless stops in Spanish in order to gain insight on historical processes of intervocalic lenition. In our corpus, about a third of all tokens of intervocalic /ptk/ are fully or partially voiced in spontaneous speech. However, even when fully voiced, /ptk/ tend to show greater constriction than /bdg/, with...

Sound change 1. Sound change and synchronic phonology This being a chapter on sound change in a volume primarily concerned with synchronic phonology, it seems appropriate to begin by stating the relationship between synchronic and diachronic phonology that will be assumed here. As is well known, for the Neogrammarians a scientific investigation of...

The Judeo-Spanish speaking population of Istanbul is the result of migrations that were due to the edict of expulsion of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The Ottoman ruler Bayezid II provided a haven to the exiles in his realm, and many came as immigrants to the capital Istanbul and other major port cities in that year. A continuous trick...

The purpose of this paper is to offer acoustic evidence for an unusual phonemic contrast in Rome Italian. In our corpus, about half of all tokens of intervocalic /p t k/ are realized with uninterrupted voicing (both word-internally and across word boundaries). Furthermore, the voiced realizations of /t/ and /k/ do not significantly differ from /d/...

Word stress has long presented challenges to phonologists, as they have sought to uncover patterns in its distribution, and devise models to account for its behaviour and formal representation both within single languages and cross-linguistically. In this collection, a team of world-renowned researchers present a variety of viewpoints on the method...

Goizueta is a small town in northwestern Navarre, Spain, bordering Gipuzkoa. According to the most recent official figures, it has slightly over 800 inhabitants, about 95% of whom speak Basque (2001, Instituto de Estadística de Navarra). All inhabitants (except for young children) also speak Spanish. In the school system standard Basque and, to a l...

In this paper I examine the prosodic nature of unstressed function words in Spanish. I defend the hypothesis that these words, like all other words in the language, have a syllable that is lexically designated as stressed. I suggest that the essential property of these words is that they are subject to a rule of prosodic merger with following eleme...

Although at the lexical level (in the citation form of words) Spanish has only high glides, mid vowels may also become nonsyllabic by a postlexical process of syllable contraction. In this paper we report on an experiment designed to study the contraction of sequences of nonhigh vowels in Castilian Spanish. Traditional phonological descriptions of...

Research in the past few decades has shown that Northern Bizkaian Basque possesses a pitch-accent system of the Tokyo Japanese type, with a contrast between lexically accented and unaccented words. There is, however, a separate area of the Basque-speaking territory where we also find tonal accent phenomena: Western Navarre. In comparison with North...

The least understood aspect of Palenquero phonology is its intonational system. This is a serious gap, as it is precisely in the realm of prosody that the most striking phonological differences between Palenquero and (Caribbean) Spanish are apparent. Although several authors have speculated that African influence may be at the source of Palenquero’...

According to some Spanish grammarians, including the Royal Spanish Academy, nouns like agua ‘water’, asa ‘handle’, etc., are feminine and take a phonologicallyconditioned allomorph of the definite article (el) that is identical to the masculine article. Our data, both from an experiment and from electronic searches, show that there is considerable...

The standardization process of the Basque language presents some unusual characteristics. Although some of the first authors to publish in Basque in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries explicitly remarked on the difficulties brought about by dialectal diversity, very little progress in the standardization of the language was made until the seco...

Romance languages show hiatus and diphthongal realisations of inherited iV sequences of rising sonority (e.g. ia). We study five Romance varieties with different degrees of contrast between the two realisation types: Romanian, with a diphthong–hiatus contrast, Spanish, with a weaker contrast, French, with no contrast (all diphthongs), and European...

José Ignacio Hualde received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Southern California in 1988. He is Professor of Spanish and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Basque Phonology (Routledge, 1991), co-author of Introducción a la lingüística hispánica (Cambridge, 2001), and co-editor of Generative...

In Spanish function words and expressions can be classified as lexically stressed or unstressed. Unstressed function words are usually realized without word-level prominence. There is also a contrast between compounds with stress on all their components and compound with a single stress, on the last member. Both in the case of function words and in...

Bullock and Gerfen show that two of the last speakers of French in Frenchville, Pennsylvania, systematically replace the French front mid round vowel (in words like deux , neuf ) with the rhoticized schwa of American English, their dominant language. As the authors argue, it is unlikely that this sound change would have arisen in the speech of Fren...

In this paper we examine the realization of accentual prominence in downstep contexts (i.e. after another accented word) in the Northern Bizkaian Basque dialect of Lekeitio. Previous work has suggested that pitch is the primary correlate of accent in this language. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that in contexts where pitch differences are l...

This paper approaches Romance intonation from a diachronic point of view. The position that is adopted is that this is an area open to investigation. Comparative techniques can be fruitfully employed for investigating the evolution and diversification of the intonational patterns of the Romance languages. The focus of the paper is on Occitan. This...

In the central and western Basque-speaking regions there are two main accentual types: In the Northern Bizkaian area we find a pitch-accent system with demarcative phrase-initial rises and uniformly falling (H*L) accents, on the last syllable of the phrase in the unmarked case. In the rest of the area the general rule is postinitial accent. This st...

In this paper we examine accentuation in Mallabia Basque. This is an accentual system that appears to be transitional between the northern Bizkaian pitch-accent system (with a lexical distinction between accented and unaccented words and ph rase-final or phrase-penultimate unmarked accentuation) and the ce ntral Basque systems (with accent on the p...

Some northern varieties of Basque possess three series of plosive or oral stop consonants: voiced /b d g/, voiceless unaspirated /p t k/, and voiceless aspirated /ph th kh/. Among the languages of Europe, Basque seems to be unique in presenting this three-way opposition (although a similar contrast was found in Ancient Greek and it is not unusual i...

Spanish and Romanian contrast vowel sequences [CiV] in hiatus and corresponding diphthongs [CjV], with some interspeaker variation. Both languages contain surface diphthongs derived historically by gliding, /CiV/ > [CjV]. They both show a strong tendency for blocking gliding word-initially, supported by native speaker judgments: Sp. [miope], Rom. [...

Some Spanish dialects have a lexical contrast between sequences in hiatus and diphthongs. Thus, whereas, for instance, dueto 'duet' admits a trisyllabic pronunciation with the sequence ue realized in hiatus [du.e.to], the word duelo 'sorrow' can only be pronounced as bisyllabic [dwe.lo]. Similarly, [pi.] 'I chirped' contrasts with [pje] foot' in th...