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MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL VARIATION IN URBAN ASTURIAN SPANISH: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND REGIONAL IDENTITY

Barnes, Sonia
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371475793

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.
Asturian, the regional language of Asturias (Spain), and Spanish have been in contact since the 14th Century. Some linguistic features of Asturian are frequently used in the Spanish of Asturian speakers (Sanchez Alvarez 1979, D’Andres 2001). Among these features are the raised vowels that appear in the masculine singular morpheme /-u/, as opposed to Spanish /-o/; and the feminine plural morpheme /-es/, as opposed to Spanish /-as/. The appearance of the Asturian variant in the urban varieties of the language is a consequence of the borrowing of the Asturian morpheme; however, speakers show variation in its use, alternating between the two options. The first part of this dissertation quantitatively explores the linguistic and extra- linguistic factors that govern this alternation analyzing production data from 24 speakers from Gijon. Mixed linear and logistic regression models were developed in R to test the effects of the independent variables on the choice between Asturian and Spanish features. Vowel height was treated as both a categorical variable and a continuous one, measuring the frequencies of the first two formants. The results show that the selection of one vowel over the other is constrained by the adjacent phonological context and the variant used in the previous form. In the case of /-as/ and /-es/, it is also constrained by the lexical category of the token. The use of Asturian variants is more likely in the speech of speakers who work in commerce, in food and restaurant industries and in manufacturing. Speakers who have a lower educational level and male speakers are also more likely to use /-u/ and /-es/. In the case of /-o/ vs. /-u/, the social tie between the speaker and their interlocutor also has a significant effect on the alternation, with Asturian /-u/ being more likely when there is a first order relationship between them. The second part of this dissertation examines the role that Asturian vowels have in the construction of urban identity and test what social meaning is associated with each linguistic variant. Using a Matched Guise Technique (Lambert et al. 1960), 192 participants in a perception experiment rated speakers' utterances containing one of the variants (/-u/ or /-o/ and /-es/ or /-as/ respectively) with regard to various social characteristics. The results show that participants rate speakers who use Asturian variants as significantly less urban, less educated, less feminine and as having a lower economic status than those who use the Spanish one. These results confirm that the social correlations that were found to be significant in the quantitative analysis of production data are meaningful and used by listeners to evaluate the identity of other speakers. The analysis also revealed that /-u/ is a stronger marker of the social categories explored in this experiment than /-es/. The results reported in this dissertation indicate that speakers strategically increase or decrease the amount of Asturian features according to how Asturian or “Gijones” they want to sound, contributing to the idea that speakers actively use variation to position themselves in the social world.
Scott Schwenter (Advisor)
Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza (Committee Member)
Terrell Morgan (Committee Member)
Donald Winford (Committee Member)
Language; Linguistics; Sociolinguistics

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Citations

  • Barnes, S. (2013). MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL VARIATION IN URBAN ASTURIAN SPANISH: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND REGIONAL IDENTITY [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371475793

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Barnes, Sonia. MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL VARIATION IN URBAN ASTURIAN SPANISH: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND REGIONAL IDENTITY. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371475793.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Barnes, Sonia. "MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL VARIATION IN URBAN ASTURIAN SPANISH: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND REGIONAL IDENTITY." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371475793

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1371475793
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