The Variable Sound Patterns of Spanish: Methods, Trends, and Innovations

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to submit a manuscript to this Special Issue of Languages that focuses on "Phonological Variation and Change in Spanish".

The study of phonological variation and change in Spanish has benefited from the use of instrumental acoustic analysis in recent times, during at least the most recent decade and a half (Minnick Fox 2006; Erker 2010; 2012; File-Muriel and Brown 2011). Such analysis complements impressionistic human judgments by offering a degree of objectivity and fine-grained analysis of phenomena that would otherwise not be observable through the lens of discrete phonological categories. At the same time, several studies stress the importance of integrating categorical assignments with acoustic measures (Díaz-Campos and Wheeler 2022; Erker 2012; Henriksen and Harper 2016), due to the fact that humans rely on categories for everyday cognition. Past research has tended to focus primarily on the discrete phonological unit (i.e., the phoneme and allophonic variants) as the locus of sound change, despite the fact that sound change also occurs at the lexical and phrasal levels (Scheibman 2000, Bybee et. al., 2016) and interacts with frequency patterns (Brown and Alba 2017), pragmatic usage (Plug 2010), and word-boundary effects (Brown et al. 2022), among other factors. We invite a wide range of papers using any appropriate theoretical approach and methodological design that analyze synchronic or diachronic data of Spanish. Of particular request are papers that lend themselves to addressing any of the following questions:

• What effect, if any, does the operationalization of the "lexical unit" (e.g., sub-word unit, word, multi-word string) have on the investigation of phonological variables in Spanish? What evidence exists to propose that sound change is lexically specific, or conversely, applies wholly across the lexicon?
• How have the fields of phonetics and sociophonetics contributed to the way phonological variation has been analyzed and interpreted in different varieties of Spanish? Examples might include, but are not limited to, the use of different acoustic correlates, such as the center of gravity, relative intensity ratios, mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCCs), among others, as well as computer-assisted techniques, such as the use of forced alignment software and acoustic software such as Praat and ToBI annotation scheme, among others.
• What methodological innovations or less-common methods have contributed meaningfully to the study of phonological variation and change in Spanish? Examples might include, but are not limited to, the remote collection of data (perhaps motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic), crowdsourcing techniques, innovations or adaptations to the traditional sociolinguistic interview, or other methods not commonly used in variationist studies.
• What statistical techniques not traditionally used in variationist studies have successfully clarified questions about variation and change in Spanish? Examples might include, but are not limited to, Bayesian analysis, bootstrapping, generalized additive models, conditional inference trees and random forest, latent variable analysis, and structural equation modeling, including models with multiple response variables.
• What effect does corpus design have on the ability of researchers to faithfully investigate phonological variables in specific varieties of Spanish? What considerations inform the decision of researchers to use or not use a particular corpus of Spanish? How does the size of a corpus (e.g., large, generalized versus small, specialized) influence the generalizability of results to the Spanish language?

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors ([email protected]; [email protected]) or to the Languages Editorial Office ([email protected]). The abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. The full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

Brown, Earl K. & Alba, Matthew C. 2017. The role of contextual frequency in the articulation of initial /f/ in Modern Spanish: The same effect as in the reduction of Latin /f/? Language Variation and Change 29(1). 57–78. (doi:10.1017/S0954394517000059).

Brown, Earl K., File-Muriel, Richard, & Gradoville, Michael. (2022). The last stronghold of word-final/s/in Barranquillero Spanish: Prevocalic word-final /s/ in cohesive bigrams. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of variationist approaches to Spanish (pp. 113–124). New York: Routledge.

Brown, Esther L. & Raymond, William D. & Brown, Earl Kjar & File-Muriel, Richard J. 2021. Lexically specific accumulation in memory of word and segment speech rates. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 17(3). 625–651. (doi:10.1515/cllt-2020-0016).

Bybee, Joan, File-Muriel, Richard, & Napoleão de Souza, Ricardo. (2016). Special reduction: A usage-based approach. Language and Cognition, 8, 421–446, doi:10.1017/langcog.2016.19.

Díaz-Campos, Manuel & Wheeler, Jamelyn. 2022. Intervocalic /d/ as a gradual variable in Caracas Spanish. In Díaz-Campos, Manuel (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish, 80–95. New York: Routledge.

Erker, Daniel G. 2010. A subsegmental approach to coda /s/ weakening in Dominican Spanish. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2010(203). 9–26.

Erker, Daniel G. 2012. Of Categories and Continua: Relating Discrete and Gradient Properties of Sociophonetic Variation. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18(2). 11–20.

File-Muriel, Richard & Brown, Earl K. 2011. The Gradient Nature of s-Lenition in Caleño Spanish. Language Variation and Change 23(2). 223–243.

Henriksen, Nicholas & Harper, Sarah K. 2016. Investigating lenition patterns in south-central Peninsular Spanish /spstsk/ clusters. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 46(3). 287–310. (doi:10.1017/S0025100316000116).

Minnick Fox, Michelle Annette. 2006. Usage-based Effects in Latin American Spanish Syllable-final /s/ Lenition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Plug, Leendert. (2010). Pragmatic constraints in Usage-based Phonology, with reference to some Dutch phrases. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 2014–2035.

Scheibman, Joanne. (2000). I dunno but… A usage-based account of the phonological reduction of don't in American English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 105–124.

Dr. Earl Kjar Brown
Dr. Richard File-Muriel
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• phonological variation and change
• innovation
• methods
• theory
• acoustic techniques
• usage-based
• laboratory approaches to phonology
• phonology and unithood
• lexical