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DELETION AND DISAMBIGUATION IN PUERTO RICAN SPANISH Shana Poplack Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, City University ofNew York Consonant deletion processes may reduce sentence redundancy and thus increase the possibility of ambiguity. Historically, languages have adapted to such processes through a variety of changes in morphology and higher levels of grammar. Synchronic quantitative evidence of such adaptation is provided here through examination of the behavior of two Puerto Rican Spanish phonological variables which interact with the grammatical system in the capacity of plural markers. Although the data contain entire sentences with no morphological trace of the plural, this paper demonstrates that—through a complex interplay of semantic, syntactic, and morphological factors —no instance in the corpus shows ambiguity ofnumber resulting from marker deletion.* 1. Introduction. Attrition and erosion of word-final consonants are widespread linguistic tendencies, well-documented for a variety of languages, both diachronically (e.g. Alonso 1962, Politzer 1972, Ferguson 1975, Foley 1975, Chen 1975) and synchronically (Labov et al. 1968, Cedergren 1973, Wolfram 1974, Terrell 1975a,b, 1978). While articulatory or phonetic factors are fundamental to the actuation of consonant reduction and deletion processes (Chen & Wang 1975), their propagation through time and throughout a linguistic system is also subject to syntactic and semantic influences. These processes tend to reduce sentence redundancy , and thus may increase the possibility of ambiguity. Functional requirements eventually entail morphosyntactic innovation and reorganization. Historically , these changes can be studied by comparing two stages in the evolution of a language. But synchronic assessment of change in progress is difficult—since the heterogeneity and variability which characterize change effectively mask its nature, direction, and rate. But systematic quantitative analysis of a large corpus of the spoken language can clarify these aspects of change. This paper adopts such an approach to the analysis of a phenomenon common to dialects of the Hispanic Caribbean, and particularly prevalent in Puerto Rican Spanish as spoken in the United States: weakening and deletion of two word-final phonemes which, even after centuries of erosion in Romance, remain in the Spanish inflectional system, (s) and (n) appear in Spanish in the environments listed in Table 1. Environment(s)(n) Word-internalesto 'this'entre 'between' Word-final in stems mes 'month'tren 'train' Word-final pluralcosas 'things'hablan 'they speak' 2d person singularhablas 'you speak' Table 1. * The field work and analysis for this report were supported by National Science Foundation Grant SOC-75-00245, Project on Linguistic Change and Variation, under the direction of William Labov. At various stages this paper has benefited from suggestions by Bill Labov, David Sankoff, Don Hindle, and Greg Guy, to whom I am very grateful. Thanks also to my colleagues on the Language Policy Task Force of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies for reading and commenting on this paper. 371 372LANGUAGE, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2 (1980) I focus specifically on those phonemes which interact with the grammatical system in the capacity of plural markers. Standard Spanish marks plurality redundantly across the NP, copying the plural marker onto each noun, adjective, and determiner in the constituent: (1)Tienen muchos juegos de esos pintados en el suelo diferentes 'They have many different games like that painted on the ground.' (CT. 80)1 Plurality is similarly repeated in the VP, where the verb must agree with its subject in person and number—resulting in maximal redundancy within the sentence : (2)Tu sabes, los doctores trataron de—sin operarla, a ver si la podían arreglar 'You know, the doctors tried to—without operating, to see if they could fix her up.' (E.0. 12) Both (s) and (n), however, are subject to well-documented processes of weakening and deletion. The most frequently attested phonetic realizations resulting from these processes are: (3)(s)(n) [s] alveolar sibilant[n] alveolar nasal [h, fi] voiceless or voiced[N] homorganic realization with laryngeal fricativefollowing consonant [0] phonetic zero[rj] velar nasal [V] deleted nasal with nasalization of preceding vowel [0] phonetic zero The presence of these [0] variants of both (s), the nominal plural marker,2 and (n), the verbal plural marker, naturally raises the following question:3 If the plural markers are deleted from both the NP and the VP, theoretically...

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