Browsing by Subject "Galician"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Contacto De Lenguas E Identidad Regional: La Variación De Las Vocales Medias En El Castellano De Galicia
    (2020-06) de la Fuente Iglesias, Monica
    This dissertation examines the variety of Spanish spoken in Galicia (northwestern Spain), which has been in close contact with Galician, the regional language, since the 13th century. Specifically, it focuses on the variation of the mid vowels /e, o/ in Spanish, as both languages differ in their vowel system: Galician has four mid vowels (/e, ɛ, o, ɔ/), whereas Spanish has only two (/e, o/). Using a variationist approach, this dissertation quantitatively investigates the use and distribution of Galician and Spanish mid vowels and the effect of linguistic and social factors. The data (6,771 vowels) come from individual sociolinguistic interviews with 64 participants from a semi-urban community. The results show that overall the use of Galician mid vowels in stressed and unstressed position in Spanish is more likely in the speech of Galician-dominant speakers, female speakers, speakers who have completed primary and secondary education, and speakers who work in manufacturing. These results are interpreted using Flege’s Speech Learning Model and by assuming a linguistic repertoires perspective that connects variation to social-indexical meaning. Differences were found between the stressed and unstressed vowel system that could be due to a language change. Using a sociophonetic perception approach, this dissertation also investigates the social meanings associated with the production of Galician or Spanish mid vowels in Galician Spanish. The results demonstrate that speakers who use Galician vowel variants in Spanish are perceived as having less leadership and charisma, more positive social traits, lower education, and are more likely to have Galician as a habitual language, a rural origin, a different way of speaking than participants, and as having learned Spanish at school than those who use Spanish vowel variants. These findings align with some correlations that were found to be statistically significant in the quantitative analysis of production. They also demonstrate that speakers are highly attuned to the social meaning conveyed through the phonetic variation of the Galician mid vowels and that they employ the Galician or Spanish features to signal their identity and to socially evaluate and position other speakers.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    La entonación del español de Galicia desde una perspectiva sociofonética
    (2014-10) Perez Castillejo, Susana
    Intonation in Spanish communicates linguistic meaning, such as the contrast between declarative and interrogative utterances, as well as extralinguistic information, such as the speaker's regional origin. One variety of Spanish in which intonation serves as a dialectal marker is the one spoken in Galicia (Northwestern Spain). This dissertation describes how Galician Spanish (GS) intonation differs from standard Castilian Spanish intonation and investigates how the differences are related to the historical contact with Galician. Participants (N = 74) were recruited from different areas across Galicia and asked to perform a contextualized sentence reading task, an unscripted question-statement game and a written sociolinguistic questionnaire. The reading task elicited structurally identical declaratives and interrogatives, with the declaratives presented in broad focus contexts and the interrogatives framed as unmarked information-seeking questions and marked confirmatory questions. Tokens (N = 6,382) were subject to acoustic analysis and several measures of pitch scaling and tonal alignment were taken. The data were also coded for contour type, pragmatic context, task formality and sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age, rural vs. urban origin, or the exposure to and use of Galician. Nine distinct patterns (four declarative and five interrogative) were discovered and their frequency of use varied across tasks, which indicates that the declarative-interrogative intonational contrast in Spanish is subject to dialectal and stylistic variation. With respect to the difference between information-seeking and confirmatory questions, it was only produced via intonation by two speakers, which suggests that this contrastive use of intonation is also subject to dialectal variation. In the sociolinguistic analysis, four aspects of Galician Spanish intonation were found to bear a relationship to the speakers' domain of exposure to Galician (intermediate peak height, prenuclear falling accents in declaratives and interrogatives, nuclear falling accents in declaratives, and unmarked falling tonemes in absolute interrogatives). The status of these as contact-induced features or as changes brought about by language-internal causes is discussed, as well as other findings that contribute to our understanding of how language contact may affect intonation, such as the relaxation of markedness restrictions or the fossilization of certain aspects of the language-shifting generation's interlanguage.