Assibilation

Abstract: This article analyzes the assibilation of /r/ among young people in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, in light of previous research on women's speech in language change. It is demonstrated that assibilation, an innovation known to have first appeared in the speech of women of the middle and upper social echelons, is closely associated with sex, sociocultural level, and attitude toward traditional male and female roles. These attitudes are suggested as a factor that plays an important role in the dynamics of the change, showing opposite effects among young men and women. That is, young men with traditional attitudes assibilate least, whereas young women with traditional attitudes assibilate most frequently. Parallels between this study and one of a similar innovation in Argentinian Spanish suggest a generalized pattern of change in which variables introduced by women of the middle and upper social echelons become markers of gender display in the lower classes, where they grow to be favored by women and avoided by men. The discovery of the role of attitude toward traditional sex roles in this pattern of change is unique to the present study.

Abstract: This paper examines the irregular application of the sound change commonly known as ‘Bantu Spirantization (BS)’ — a particular type of assibilation — in front of certain common Bantu morphemes. This irregularity can to a large extent be explained as the result of the progressive morphologization (through ‘dephonologization’) and lexicalization to which the sound shift was exposed across Bantu. The interaction with another common Bantu sound change, i.e. the 7-to-5-vowel merger, created the conditions necessary for the morphologization of BS, while analogy played an important role in its blocking and retraction from certain morphological domains. Differing morpho-prosodic constraints are at the origin of the varying heteromorphemic conditioning of BS. These uneven morphologization patterns, especially before the agentive suffix -i, were entrenched in the lexicon thanks to the lexicalization of agent nouns. The typology of Agent Noun Spirantization (ans) developed in this paper not only contributes to a better understanding of the historical processes underlying the varying patterns of BS morphologization and lexicalization, but also to internal Bantu classification. The different ANS types are geographically distributed in such a way that they allow to distinguish major Bantu subgroups. From a methodological point of view, this article thus shows how differential morphologization and lexicalization patterns can be used as tools for historical classification.

Abstract: This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [t∫] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2006) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by by /j/, and (b) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of two acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase of /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/. Furthermore, we unexpectedly found that the friction phase of /tj/ is significantly longer than that of /di/. An additional finding not related to the topic of the present study was that the Polish voiceless stops of the four speakers tested showed aspiration, in contrast to phonetic descriptions of these sounds as unaspirated.