Course Description
The Spanish sound system using core concepts of linguistics in general and phonology in particular. Characterization and transcription of spoken Spanish. Analysis of important phenomena of language variation in the Hispanic world, including national, geographical, historical, and social dialects. Given in Spanish.
Athena Title
SP PHON &PHONOLOGY
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course will provide students with a foundation in Spanish articulatory phonetics and structual phonology. Students will be able to describe the anatomy and physiology of speech production and the articulatory features of Spanish consonants and vowels. They will learn to transcribe Spanish phonetically and identify aspects of Spanish pronunciation that are problematic for native speakers of English. Attention will be given to cosonants, vowels, syllables and syllabification, sound sequences in words and utterances, prosodic and orthographic stress, and intonation. Students will investigate the nature of Spanish phonological rules and representations and phonological processes operating on Spanish. they will study notation relevant to the study of dialectal variation such as language, dialect, markedness, and variable rules. They will examine phonological and phonetic variation in the Spanish of Latin America, Spain, and the United States as a result of geographical, historical, social, and contextual factors. Topics will include seseo, ceceo, yeismo, aspiration and deletion, velarization, lateralization, and "rehilamiento".
Topical Outline
1) Production and description of speech sounds 2) Phonetics and phonemics 3) Syllables, prosodic stress; vowels and diphthongs; the phonemic phrase; linking 4) Articulatory Phonetics: Vowels and consonants 5) Structural phonology: phoneme, allophones, allophonic distribution, phological rules. 6) Distinctive feature classification of the sounds of Spanish (major classes, vowels, glides) 7) Distinctive feature classification of obstruent and sonorant consonants. 8) Principles of phonological analysis: phonemic representations, phonological rules. 9) Variation: nasal and lateral assimilation, lax stops and fricatives, voicing assimilation, lax vowels, glides. 10) Word-level phonology: linguistic units, abstractness, word-level phonology rules. 11) Everywhere rules; markedness theory; redundancy rules; sociolinguistics and variable rules. 12) Dialectal variation: Penisular Spanish; Latin American Spanish 13) Variation in the U. S. , Mexico, and the Caribbean 14) Variation in the Highlands of South America and in the Southern Cone
Syllabus
Public CV