Spanish non-continuants at the phonology-phonetics interface

Abstract

This paper takes a series of lenition phenomena from Gran Canarian Spanish as a point of departure to discuss the influence of phonology on the phonetics component. Based on phonetic and phonological data, it can be concluded that a blocking effect ensues between the process of coda deletion and post-vocalic voicing, giving rise to phonetic opacity. Against the assumption that the latter process is phonological in nature, acous-tic data suggest that it is highly gradient, coarticulatory and variable, in which case it is inexplicable why it is blocked by phonological segment deletion. The proposed solution set forth in this paper is that the phonetic component has access to deep structure beyond featural specifications of sounds. What is more, evidence from prosody indicates that structural information concerning prosodic boundaries is also transposed into phonetics and influences production. Thus, the type and amount of information computed at the phonetics-phonology interface needs to be revised and supplemented by turbid structures in order to account for surface variability and both inter- and intra-speaker differences.