Hiatus resolution in Mexican Spanish. An optimality-theoretic approach

Abstract

The goal of this thesis deals with an examination regarding the range of phonological processes regarding the resolutions of different types of hiatus contexts in different morphosyntactic environments. This thesis embraces the examination of the hiatuses in word margins where the vowel /a/ occupies the position as V1 or V2, and interacts with the rest of the vowels of the Spanish system /e i o u/. The language under examination here is Mexican Spanish. In this Spanish dialect, we observe that the speakers have a tendency to resolve the hiatuses in arbitrary ways; one speaker can resolve the same hiatus in different ways regardless the morphosyntactic conditions. In this study, we do not propose a strict analysis to embrace all the range of resolutions; instead, we propose several analyses for the most relevant output structures within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004). Regarding this, we posit a set of markedness constraints in order to support the phonetic variation among the speakers and the presence of output structures considered ‘unusual’ but accepted among the speakers. In addition, we observe that two of the processes in this language: deletion of V2 and coalescence of V1 and V2, are motivated by factors beyond the morphosyntactic domain.