Coda /s/ regional, discursive and phonetic variation in the speech of a group of Chilean university professionals

Abstract

The present article falls within the framework of a quantitative and descriptive sociolinguistics perspective and it aims to describe the phenomenon of coda /s/ variation in a sample of college-educated subjects, speakers of Chilean Spanish. Moreover, this research aims to describe the variation of coda /s/ in Chilean Spanish regarding three variables: city of origin of the informant, discourse modality (reading aloud and semispontaneous interview) and phonetic context (wordinterior and word-final). In order to do so, a sample of 32 informants from 8 different Chilean regional capital cities was selected from FONDECYT4  Project N.1120886. The sample was analyzed by means of an auditory classical analysis, which considered n=3.264 tokens of coda /s/. The results from the descriptive analysis and from a Pearson’s chi-squared test show that the variables “discourse modality” and “phonic context” have an effect on the variation of coda /s/ in the sampled data. On the other hand, the analysis regarding the diatopic variable and its effect on coda /s/ variation was not conclusive.