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Part of
Innovative Approaches to Research in Hispanic Linguistics: Regional, diachronic, and learner profile variation
Edited by Sara Fernández Cuenca, Tiffany Judy and Lauren Miller
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 38] 2023
► pp. 106–129

Chapter 5
The emergence of sound change
in two varieties of Spanish

A usage-based analysis of variable trill /r/ production in Caracas, Venezuela, and Caguas, Puerto Rico

| Indiana University
| Indiana University
| Indiana University
| Indiana University
| Indiana University

We examine social and linguistic factors, including lexical frequency, that influence variable production of the alveolar rhotic trill in Caracas, Venezuela, and the region surrounding Caguas, Puerto Rico. Two categories of rhotic productions are established: non-innovative trills with two or more occlusions and innovative reduced ones with fewer than two occlusions and possible frication. Phonetic context, rhotic duration, and lexical frequency conditioned trill production in both varieties; mixed-effect logistic regressions showed that shorter duration and high frequency tokens predicted use of innovative variants in both varieties, while low vowels also did so in Caracas. This suggests that Caracas and Caguas are experiencing variation reflective of the early stages of a linguistic change, with linguistic factors conditioning reduced variants.

Keywords: Venezuela, Puerto Rico, rhotic trills, Caribbean Spanish, reduction, frequency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature
    • 2.1A phonetic description of trill production
    • 2.2A sociolinguistic description of trill production
    • 2.3Research questions
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1The Caracas corpus
    • 3.2The Caguas area corpus
    • 3.3Acoustic analysis and the dependent variable
    • 3.4Independent variables
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Logistic regression results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.38.05pol
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