New Mexican Spanish: Insight into the Variable Reduction of "La ehe inihial" (/s-/)

Abstract

For close to a century, a noted feature of the Spanish of New Mexico has been the variable aspiration and deletion of syllable-initial /s/ (Espinosa 1909), yet no empirical investigations have been undertaken to study this process within this variety of Spanish in the United States. In fact, syllable-initial /s/ world-wide is rarely quantified, with few exceptions (e.g., Garcia and Talion 1995). This relative lack of empirical analysis means that there is much to be learned from quantitative analysis of this variable phonological reductive process. The present study examines the exact nature of syllable-initial /s/ reduction using quantitative methods to challenge the notions that syllable-initial /s-/ reduction stems directly from syllable-final /-s/ reduction, and that intervocalic /s-/ reduction is found only in a limited set of lexemes.

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