Resumen de Linguistic factors conditioning glottal constriction in Nicaraguan Spanish
This paper provides the first quantitative exploration of the linguistic factors conditioning glottal constriction in Nicaraguan Spanish, an allophone of word-final, intervocalic /s/, e.g. [ma.'al.to] for más alto ‘higher’. To date the variant has only been mentioned in passing in dialectal surveys (Quesada Pacheco 1996; Rosales Solís 2010) or described as a contact feature in other dialects of Spanish, i.e. Philipino (Lipski 2000), Yucatan (Lope Blanch 1987: 108-124), Argentinian/Paraguayan (Sanicky 1989; Thon 1989), and Puerto Rican Spanish (Valentín-Márquez 2006). However, the Spanish spoken in Managua is not in contact with any other languages, and I argue that glottal constriction in this dialect is a phonetically motivated, language-internal phenomenon. After a statistical analysis of 3,701 tokens from 36 Managuan participants, I conclude that glottal constriction serves to 1)strengthen prosodically strong positions due to its likelihood before word-initial, stressed vowels and 2) avoid postlexical hiatus, being more likely after longer words with high rates of /s/ deletion
