Resolucion de hiatos en verbos -ear: Un estudio sociofonetico en una ciudad mexicana

This dissertation investigates the linguistic and social constraints that condition variation in hiatus resolution in --ear verbs in Mexican Spanish. Previous literature on hiatus resolution suggests a tendency in many languages, including Spanish, to avoid adjacent heterosyllabic vowels by employing different strategies to resolve hiatus. This array of possibilities to deal with heterosyllabic vowel sequences could therefore yield a heterogeneous variation showing both intra-speaker and inter-speaker variation. Moreover, the distinction between one strategy and another can sometimes be misleading or imprecise to the untrained ear and the real pool of strategies can extend beyond our own perception. On social grounds, some resolution strategies in Spanish, like diphthongization with a high glide, have been associated with people who are rural, illiterate or from lower social classes.;This dissertation contributes to the literature on hiatus resolution in Spanish by describing and analyzing six different strategies used at the lexical level, particularly with --ear verbs in Mexican Spanish. A variationist methodology along with an experimental approach were used to identify the acoustic cues that distinguish several different strategies for resolving hiatus, and to discover the significant internal and external factors constraining variation in hiatus resolution in the vowel sequences derived from --ear verbs. The acoustic results show that hiatuses are distinct from diphthongs in duration on average, but that duration is not a very reliable cue because of frequent speech rate changes even within the same speaker. Other cues considered for the definition of the strategies are the rate of the transition curve and its increase/decrease rate; F1 and F2 values; wave forms, and auditory impression. On average, the rate of the transition curve is higher in hiatuses, and the F2 values are higher in diphthongs in their initial stage than those of hiatuses. F1 values provide an acoustic cue for distinguishing a mid-glide from a high glide.;Six strategies were identified in the resolution of contiguous vowel sequences in --ear verbs: hiatus maintenance, diphthong formation with mid glide, diphthong formation with high glide, elision, hiatus with a high vowel, and coalescence. The results show that hiatus resolution is a linguistically and socially conditioned phenomenon. Stress was found to be the main structural constraint followed by the V2 quality and the type of syllable. Age, education, and sex were the social factors affecting the strategies selected by the informants.;The most favored hiatus resolution strategies in descending order were diphthong formation with mid glide, maintenance of hiatus, diphthong formation with high glide, and elision. While diphthong formation with a high glide is favored by women, the oldest group, and also people with a low education level, diphthong formation with a mid glide is led by men, the youngest groups, and people with a university or graduate level of education. The results and analysis of the speech community suggest the presence of a change in progress having as its most global innovative variant diphthong formation with a mid glide, which is distinguished from the local variant, the diphthong with a high glide. The persistence of different resolution strategies, in contrast to hiatus maintenance, reconfirms the anti-hiatus tendency of Mexican Spanish.