/s/ aspiration in Andalusian Spanish in word internal position and across word boundaries: an experimental study of four cities

This study presents acoustic data relating to the realisation of coda /s/ in four cities in Andalusia. It differs from the majority of recent studies in that it analyses the effects of coda /s/ on all types of consonants, both word-internally and across word-boundaries. In the latter context, different morphological values of /s/ are also analysed. The results suggest that the phonological system of Andalusian Spanish is being radically altered. In word internal position, the historical effects of /s/ aspiration are producing a series of new incipient phonemic distinctions of which the most robust are elongated and/or aspirated consonants. As for across word-boundaries, the findings are only significantly different from word-internal coda /s/ for the city of Seville. For the speech of this city, it seems that /s/ has been lost / is being lost when it is a marker of 2sg on verbs and plural on nouns. However, when /s/ is part of lexeme, i.e. in the word dos ‘two’, the phonetic cues are robust and similar to those in word-internal position. I end the article with a tentative hypothesis as to how this situation could be effecting the morphological system and point to possible future developments.