The Spanish of Ponce, Puerto Rico: A phonetic, phonological, and intonational analysis

This study investigates four aspects of Puerto Rican Spanish as represented in the Autonomous Municipality of Ponce: the behavior of coda /[alveolar flap]/, the behavior of /r/, the different realizations of coda /s/, and its intonational phonology. Previous studies on Puerto Rican Spanish report that coda /[alveolar flap]/ is normally realized as a lateral sound due to a process of neutralization of /[alveolar flap]/ and /l/; that /r/ is velarized in what has been labeled velarization of /r/; and that coda /s/ could either be aspirated or elided with great variability in different contexts, but when elided, the preceding vowel is usually either opened of lengthened. With regards to the intonational phonology, mostly general descriptions of neutral broad focus declaratives and yes/no questions overall intonational contours and nuclear configurations have been given and only for the Spanish of San Juan, Puerto Rico.;The current study analyzes data from 9 speakers of Spanish from Ponce, Puerto Rico. The segmental analyses were based on the Acoustic Theory of Speech Production and the autosegmental portion on the Autosegmental-Metrical Model of intonational phonology and the Tones and Break Indices framework and transcription system. The present research finds that coda /[alveolar flap]/ lateralizes into a sound very close to regular [l] but with a lower F4. The so-called neutralization of /[alveolar flap]/ and /l/, hence, constitutes a case of incomplete neutralization. The process is therefore better described as one of lateralization. With regards to /r/, it is found that the phoneme undergoes a process of uvularization, not of velarization as previously reported, with a voiceless uvular trill and a voiceless uvular fricative as the primary realizations. As for /s/, aspirations and elisions are found. The default aspiration is voiced, even before voiceless consonants. Elisions are only reported before voiced consonants and triggers compensatory lengthening of the following consonant. A previously unknown glottal stop realization is also reported. In terms of the intonational phonology, various types of sentences were analyzed: broad and narrow focus declaratives, broad focus yes/no questions, and broad focus wh-questions. The current model finds a rich tonal inventory, including pitch accents---associated with metrically prominent positions of the utterance---and boundary tones, associated to the edges of two prosodic units: the intermediate phrase and the intonational phrase.