Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish

Author(s): Tracy D. Terrell

Source: Hispania, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec., 1979), pp. 599-612
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/340142
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 FINAL/S/ IN CUBAN SPANISH
TRACY D. TERRELL
University of California, Irvine
1. Introduction.
The phonological processes of aspira-
tion (s -- h) and deletion (s -- 0) of / s / in
syllable final (mosca 'fly') and word final
(los niflos 'the children') position affect so
many segments that the speech of Spanish
speakers of areas in which these processes
are used produces an overall phonetic
impression quite different when com-
pared with dialects in which these
processes are not normally used. Can-
field,' in his attempt to provide a socio-
historical explanation for the geographi-
cal distribution of most of the major
phonological characteristics of American
Spanish, suggests that aspiration of Is/l is
a classificatory factor which will divide
American Spanish into two types which
he terms Highlands Spanish, ie., Mexico
City, Guatemala City, Bogota, Lima, etc.
where aspiration of final /Is/ is not
normally found and Lowlands Spanish,
ie., the Caribbean, Veracruz, Panamd,
Caracas, the coasts of Colombia and
Ecuador, etc., where aspiration is
common in all socioeconomic levels of
society. His thesis is that aspiration was a
late Andalusian trait which spread only to
those areas which maintained close com-
mercial contact with Seville (in Southern
Spain), mainly the Caribbean, but which
did not spread to the governmental
centers of Mexico, Bogota and Lima, all
somewhat isolated and more conserva-
tive.
Canfield does not really discuss the
process of / s/ deletion in any detail. This
is surprising since /s/ is the plural mor-
pheme for nouns and their adjectival
modifiers and a verbal marker for person-
number. Widespread deletion would
therefore affect the grammatical systems
of these dialects. In fact, until very
recently most dialect investigation was
limited to indicating the existence of the
phenomenon of aspiration and deletion
and to describing the relevant allophones
and their distribution in various parts of
599
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the Spanish speaking world with few
attempts at any explanation of the
processes involved.
All who have written on aspiration and
deletion in various parts of the Spanish-
speaking world have noted that these
processes are socially and stylistically
stratified, that is, the use of aspirated
phones or the deletion of the phoneme is
not obligatory and the phonetic output
varies according to the socioeconomic
class of the speaker and the social situ-
ation in which he finds himself. It is
generally agreed that the index of aspira-
tion and deletion is directly related to
these two factors; ie., the processes are
least used in formal situations among
upper class speakers. Thus a detailed
study of these processes would be perti-
nent to sociolinguistic theory. It is also
clear from the impressionistic descriptions
of the speech in areas in which these
processes are used, that there are various
stages of development of the adoption
and spread of these two rules which are
represented synchronically in various
parts of the Spanish speaking world. A
careful comparison of these differences
could lead us to a diachronic explanation
of these phonological rules.
Ma and Herasimchuk,2 in their study of
the New York area Spanish-English
bilingualism, demonstrated conclusively
that aspiration and deletion are stylisti-
cally stratified. As a matter of course,
they first tried to determine the linguistic
correlates of these processes. They dis-
covered indications that both phonologi-
cal and grammatical contexts were rele-
vant to an explanation of their operation.3
We assert that this [the variation with regard to
deletion] is due to the fact that grammatical factors,
and not phonological factors, are operating here ...
differential phonetic realizations in styles B and A
force us to conclude that the grammatical environ-
ments of final /s/ have as great an effect as any
other factor on Puerto Rican Spanish speakers'
behavior regarding the variable (S) along the axis of
600 Tracy Terrell
stylistic variation . . . we can call this phenomenon
a reduction of grammatical redundancy.
This complex interaction of grammatical
and phonological constraints, especially if
we can explain their development, should
prove to be most important in extending
our understanding of phonological
change in general.
2. Methods and Materials.
The data in this investigation were
collected from the phonetic transcriptions
of recorded interviews with Cubans
residing in Miami. These taped interviews
are a part of the "Coordinated Study of
the Linguistic Norm of the Principal
Cities of Latin America and of Spain."4
The 22 informants were between the ages
of 25 and 50, middle class, and native of
the capital city of Havana. None had
lived more than three months in the
United States at the time of the inter-
views. Reading styles were not recorded
and speech style varied little; most of the
interviews were relaxed but of course not
completely informal.
Certain methodological observations
are in order. It was my intention to
distinguish a variety of phonetic manifes-
tations of /s1/.5 However, it became
quickly apparent that such a task, theo-
retically so simple, on a practical basis
was impossible. It is imperative in any
science to demand that others be able to
replicate the results of any investigation.
Replicability of the results would have
been very difficult to achieve with a fine
transcription. For this reason, the follow-
ing system was selected.
s all phones with some sibilance.
0 complete absence of a phone representing
/s/.
h normally aspirated, sometimes very weak,
often voiced or nasalized and possibly
assimilated resulting in a geminate conso-
nant cluster.
It should be noted that this is essentially
the same system used by others who have
done quantitative studies of Spanish
phonology.6
Syllable final Is/ in Spanish in word
internal position appears before most
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Hispania62 (December 1979)
consonants: isla 'island', mismo 'same',
espero 'I hope', mdscara 'mask', and so
forth. Word internal Is/ of course has no
other function than to form part of the
word, however, the presence or absence
of Is/ in this position is contrastive. The
functional load of this contrast is not
high, however. Some minimal pairs are
patilla 'sideburns' and pastillas 'pills',
retar 'to dare, challenge', and restar 'to
subtract', buque 'ship, large boat' and
busque 'search' (command form).
In word final position /Is/ appears
before all word initial consonants, las
casas 'the houses', before vowels, las
amigas 'the girl friends', and in phrase
final position, vamos 'let's go'. Word
final /Is/ has three principal functions. It
may be an integral part of a lexical word
with no grammatical or morphological
function. This lexical /s/ appears on
adverb-prepositions such as antes
'before', despuds 'after', comment words
such as entonces 'then' and pues 'well',
the comparatives mds 'more', menos
'less', singular nouns such as luz 'light',
vez 'occasion', nouns which may be either
singular or plural lunes 'Monday, Mon-
days', crisis 'crisis, crises', and so forth.
Word final /s/ also functions as a verb
morpheme or as a part of a verb mor-
pheme. It is the final phoneme of /-mos/
the first person plural marker for all verb
forms, hablamos 'we speak'. It is the sole
indicator of the second person singular
familiar (tti) forms: tti tienes 'you have',
tt' estudiabas 'you studied', tti vendrds
'you will come' (with the exception of the
preterite form tti viviste 'you lived').
Word final / s / functions also as a mor-
pheme of number indicating plurality for
nouns, niios 'children', for adjectives
bonitos 'pretty' and for certain pronouns,
ellos 'they'.
Ma and Herasimchuk and Cedergren
discovered in Puerto Rican and Pana-
manian Spanish that a wide variety of
factors must be taken into account in
order to achieve a description and expla-
nation of the application of aspiration
and deletion in speech. It was therefore
 Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish 601

necessary to determine the importance of of these factors using a subprogram of

these factors in the educated speech of
middle class Cubans. A classification of
the data according to a large number of
factors on a practical level is impossible
when one is dealing with thousands of
cases. Therefore it was decided to elabo-
rate a coding system for all possible reve-
lant factors and create a cross tabulation
SPSS, a prewrittenset of programsfor
help in organizing and analyzing data in
quantitative investigations in the social
sciences.7
Each occurrence of I/s/ was coded and
punched on IBM cards using the follow-
ing system:

Column Contains Sample

1 Allophone
2 Word position
3 Phonological Context
4 Length
5 Grammatical Function
S, H, O
I (internal), F (final)
C (consonant), S (stressed vowel), U (unstressed vowel), P (pause)
M (monosyllabic), P (polysyllabic).
LE (lexical), MO (the ending -mos), LO (the / s / on the
determiner los), AA (the /s/ of an adjective which follows the
noun it modifies), and so forth.

In this way it was possible to obtain a
large number of data tables in which all
occurences of each allophone was classi-
fied according to any combination of the
other variables coded (word position,
phonological context, word length, and
grammatical function.)
Overall results
The distribution of three principal sur-
face manifestations of / s / in the corpus is
given in Table 1.
TABLE 1: TOTAL PHONE DISTRIBUTION
sibilant 18% (1443)
aspiration 61% (4947)
deletion 21% (1662)
number of cases (8052)
Clearly the phonetic norm for word and
syllable final / s / for educated middle class
speakers is some sort of aspiration. Com-
plete deletion (with no other compensa-
tory changes in adjacent segments) is
applied about one-fourth of the time. On
the other hand, sibilant retention,
although the least common of the three
possibilities, is certainly more than spo-
radic. More importantly, it would be
impossible to claim that a sibilant appears
in the speech of these 22 informants (and
it did appear in the speech of all of them)
because of some sort of hypercorrection.
The distribution of the surface mani-
festations of word internal /s/ is some-
what different from the distribution for
the corpus as a whole.
TABLE 2: SYLLABLE FINAL /s/
sibilant 3% (52)
aspiration 97% (1655)
deletion 0% (4)
number of cases (1711)
It appears that among the informants of
this investigation complete deletion in
word internal position is very sporadic,
and sibilant retention is almost as un-
common. Aspiration is clearly the pre-
ferred allophone. Any breakdown accord-
ing to following consonant would be
futile, since aspiration is obviously the
norm for all environments.
One methodological qualification is in
order at this point. When transcribing, I
was very careful to indicate 0 only in the
case that I was absolutely sure that I heard
nothing at all as a representation of the
phoneme Is/. However, this is very diffi-
cult to determine in word internal position
since in all cases the Is/ is followed very
closely by another consonant. Weak
aspiration, complete assimilation result-
ing in a gemminate consonant and a
nasalized aspiration are very difficult to
distinguish from the complete absence of

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602 Tracy Terrell Hispania62 (December 1979)

/s/. Even more difficult is the problem of
vowel length. Aspiration, particularly if
voiced, is nothing more than a continu-
ation of the preceding vowel. In these
cases, we transcribed h since there was
indeed a phonetic representation of Is/;
others may prefer to label this phenome-
non as deletion, in which case the rate of
deletion with that analysis would be much
higher than in this paper.
It should be noted that even if the rate
of deletion had been higher, it would in
normal circumstances not result in diffi-
culties in comprehension. As we noted the
number of minimal pairs are few, and
most of these are distinguished easily by
context. Jokes with the minimal pair
pecador 'sinner' and pescador 'fisher-
man' are common in the Caribbean
(especially among groups with high
deletion rates), but even this pair is easily
differentiated in most contexts.
Word Final /s/: General Considerations.
Word final Is/ is numerically more
important since over two-thirds of the
cases of / s / occur in this position. In
addition the possibilities for the inter-
action of constraining factors are greater
since in word final position / s / may be
followed by a consonant, a vowel or a
pause, and may function morphologically
and syntactically in a number of ways.
Particularly important is the determi-
nation of the factors which influence the
deletion of word final /s/ since in many
cases /s/ is the sole indicator of plurality
in the noun phrase.
Wordfinal /s/: Phonological constraints.
The data displayed in Table 3 test the
possible significance of the initial segment
of the following word on word final Is/.

TABLE 3: DISTRIBUTION OF PHONES BY

PHONOLOGICAL CONTEXT
sibilant aspiration deletion number
preconsonantal 2%7o 75% 23 % 3265
prevocalic 18%7o 48%7o 34%7o 1300
prepausal 61%7o 13%7o 26%7o 1776

this study, I hypothesized that two general

Sibilant retention and aspiration are clear-
ly conditioned by phonological context. factors would account for most of the
On the other hand, it is less clear that variability found in the data: word length
and redundancy. By word length I meant
rates of deletion are so affected. The rate
of deletion in prevocalic position is some-
the number of syllables a word contains. I
what higher than in the other two con- hypothesized that the / s / of monosyllable
texts. Given the large number of cases forms would be deleted less than the Is/
of polysyllabic forms. By redundancy I
examined, we could show that statistically
this figure is different to a significantmeant the possibility of syntactic and
degree. However, I doubt that this statis-
morphological contrast. The second
tical significance can be translated intoperson singular verbal morpheme / s / con-
linguistic significance. Indeed an exami-trasts with its absence in the third person
nation of the deletion rates for each indi-
singular forms: tt' tienes 'you have' vs.
vidual informant did not reveal any &ltiene 'he has'. Plural /s/ contrasts with
significant correlations between phono- the singular forms: las mesas 'the tables'
logical context and rates of deletion." vs. la mesa 'the table'. I hypothesized that
if /s/ was contrastive it would be deleted
Constraints on deletion. less than if it was redundant. For
In word final position, Is/ may have example, I assumed that the plural marker
one of three general functions: lexical, of las 'the- feminine' would be deleted less
verbal, and plural. At the beginning of frequently than the marker for los 'the-

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 Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish 603

masculine' since in the latter case the Deletion of Lexical /s/

change from el to lo(s) (singular to plural) The data in Table 5 showed that dele-
sufficed to signal plurality. As we will see tion applied to lexical /s/ in about 30% of
the hypotheses were only partially correct the cases. This figure, it turns out, is not
and had to be considerably revised. significant because it represents the
average of two very different subclasses:
Deletion, Word Length, and monosyllabic lexical /Is/ and polysyllabic
Grammatical Function. lexical /s/. The data are displayed in
Deletion was found to be correlated Table 6.
significantly with word length. The data
for the entire corpus are displayed in TABLE 6: DELETION OF LEXICAL /s/
BY LENGTH
Table 4.
monosyllabic 10% (46) 452
TABLE 4: DELETION OF /s/ poly-
BY WORD LENGTH syllabic 4407o(278) 636
monosyllabic 607o(131) 2117 Mean Number of cases
polysyllabic 36% (1527) 4225
Mean Number of cases It is now clear that the 30% figure for
deletion of lexical /s / was high because
From the data we can see that informants there are many more cases of deletion of
tended to avoid deletion in monosyllabic /Is/ in polysyllabic forms than in mono-
forms just as hypothesized. I had also syllabic forms. In fact, the rates of dele-
hypothesized that deletion would be con- tion of lexical /s/ according to length
trolled by grammatical function. To test match very closely the rates for the entire
this hypothesis I examined the rates of corpus. (See Table 4) and it is very doubt-
deletion for lexical /s/ compared to ful that the category "lexical / s / " is in
inflectional (grammatical) /s/. The latter any way a constraint on the rule of /s/
amounts to a combination of the two deletion.
categories of verbal /s/ and plural /Is/. Even this subdivision (monosyllabic-
The data are displayed in Table 5. polysyllabic) is not completely satis-
factory. A further subclassification is
TABLE 5: DELETION OF /s/ BY found in Table 7 in which the very
GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION
commonly occuring items entonces
lexical 30% (324) 1088 'then', pues 'well', and mdis 'more' are
inflectional 25% (1334) 5252 displayed separately.
Mean Number of cases
TABLE 7: DELETION OF LEXICAL /s/:
SUBCLASSIFICATION
Although deletion is somewhat lower for
inflectional /Is/, the difference (30%- entonces 78% (189) 243
25%) is not statistically significant. pues 24% (27) 111
Certainly the striking difference between other poly-
rates of deletion for monosyllabic and lexical 23% (87) 377
other mono-
polysyllabic forms is not duplicated. This lexical 13%o(13) 102
does not imply that there are no differ-
ences between the two categories (lexical mds 3% (6) 238
and inflectional / s /) just that this division Mean Number of cases
is not necessarily the correct classification
of the grammatical function of Is/. The items entonces and madsclearly repre-
Therefore, we will proceed to examine sent extremes of rule application and are
constraints on deletion of /s/ in the three most probably marked in the minds of the
major classes: lexical, verbal, and plural. informants as lexical exceptions to the

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604 Tracy Terrell
general tendencies of /s/ deletion. It is
even possible that for many speakers
entonces has been restructured in the
lexicon without a final /s/. The tendency
for higher deletion in polysyllables and
for lower deletion in monosyllabic words
is still evident, however.
Inflectional /s/ and Word Length.
The rate of deletion reflected in Table 7
for inflectional /Is/ is merely a composite
figure representing various distinct cate-
gories. The monosyllabic-polysyllabic dis-
tinction appears to play a more significant
role for determining deletion of inflec-
tional /s/.
TABLE 8: DELETION OF INFLECTIONAL /s/
BY LENGTH
monosyllabic 5% (85) 1659
polysyllabic 35% (1249) 3587
Mean Number of cases
From the data it is clear that the lower
rate of deletion in Table 5 (300%7 lexical vs.
250%7 inflectional) was due entirely to the
fact that the ratio of monosyllabic to
polysyllabic forms is much higher for
inflectional /Is/ than for lexical /Is/. In
addition, a comparison of the figures in
Table 8 and Table 4 demonstrates that the
rates in the latter reflect the fact that
inflectional / s / is much more common
than lexical / s /: 83%0of all word final /Is
in the corpus is inflectional.
On the other hand, we have not actually
demonstrated that the monosyllabic-poly-
syllabic distinction is the relevant con-
straint on the deletion of inflectional Is/.
To show that it is not, we must subdivide
the inflectional /s/ category according to
the function of / s / fulfills in the sentence.
We will first consider a classification by
major grammatical class.
TABLE 9: INFLECTIONAL /s/:
MAJOR GRAMMATICAL CLASS
12% (229) 1894
adjective
verb 30% (276) 934
noun 33% (676) 2055
prounouns 41% (153) 369
Mean Number of cases
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62(December
Hispania 1979)
Major grammatical class does not
appear to be directly relevant in deter-
mining rates of deletion, except in the case
of adjectival /s/. Therefore, we will
examine deletion rates in some detail for
each category.
Deletion of Verbal /s/.
We will consider three subdivisions of
verbal /s/: (1) -mos, first person plural
morpheme, (2) -s, second person singular
morpheme, and (3) the form es 'is'.
Forms with -mos are always polysyllabic,
vivimos 'we live', vemos 'we see', etc.,
es is, of course, monosyllabic. Second
person singular forms on the other hand,
may be either polysyllabic, necesitas 'you
need', or monosyllabic ves 'you see', das
'you give', etc.
TABLE 10: DELETION OF VERBAL /s/
first person
plural 660%o(242) 367
second sing.
poly. 52% (13) 25
ser, third
sing. es 4% (21) 537
secondsing.
mono. 0% (0) 5
Mean Number of cases
The monosyllabic-polysyllabic division is
clearly the constraint which controls the
deletion of verbal / s / . I predicted that the
functional criterion, redundancy, would
play a role in constraining deletion of
verbal /s/. If that had been the case, dele-
tion of all cases of second person singular
/s/ would have been low. Although the
total number of occurrences of this mor-
pheme in the corpus is not high (due no
doubt to the semiformal nature of the
interview situation), there is no indication
that these forms are treated by the native
speakers any differently than other poly-
syllabic forms.9
There are two possible factors which
could constrain deletion of plural /s/:
length and redundancy. However, the two
are not easy to separate. From the point
of view of the listener all /s/'s in a noun
phrase except the first one are redundant:
 Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish 605

Los primero(s) estudiante(s) nuevo(s) curtailedin first position for polysyllabic

serdn nombrado(s)como canditato(s)a
reelecci6n.'The first new studentswill be
named as candidates to reelection.'
Almost without exception redundant
/s/'s are also parts of polysyllabicforms
and converselywordswhichappearin the
first position of a noun phrase are very
often monosyllabic. In this corpus all
plural nouns and adjectives were poly-
syllabic (pies is an example of a mono-
syllabic plural noun) and 70% of the
words appearingin the first position of a
noun phrase were monosyllabic. Pro-
nouns, on the other hand, are divided
more or less equally between mono and
polysyllabicforms. In the following dis-
cussion, I will first attend to the function
of redundancyas a constrainton / s / dele-
tion and then turn to the possible influ-
ence of word length.
In Table 11 plural /s/ is classified
accordingto position.
TABLE 11: DELETION OF /s/ IN ADJECTIVES
First position 3% (45) 1343 (total)
Los 1% (6) 436
Las 1% (3) 324
Number modifier 9% (12) 134
Other first
position 5% (24) 449
Redundant plural
marker 38% (179) 479 (total)
second position adj. 18% (7) 38
predicate adj. 37% (45) 123
adj. following noun 40% (127) 318
It is quite clear that the position of
adjectival /s/ in the noun phrase deter-
mines the possibility of deletion. First
position /s/ is retained(either as a sibi-
lant, or as aspiration)almostcategorically
by the informantsof this project. Subse-
quent / s is deleted quite freely. The
following examples will illustrate the
surfacemanifestationof this constraint.
Loh libro que leh di son interesante.
Lah intencione parecen dificile de juhgar.
en aquelloh lugare poblacionale
de antiguoh techo y muro
por lah mucha lucha interna
muchah persona que han sido invitada aqui less than the former(objectpronounslos,
Deletion of adjectival /s/ is severely las, les, nos). The fact that deletion in
(6%), algunos 'some', muchos 'many',
nuestros 'our', etc, as well as mono-
syllabic(2%) forms, mis 'my', los, 'the',
sus 'his, her, their, your', etc. The pri-
mary consideration is simply that the
morphemewhich criticallyfirst indicates
the pluralityof the noun phraseshouldbe
preserved.
Deletion of nominal /s/ is normally
fairly high.
TABLE 12: DELETION OF NOMINAL /s/
unmodified
nouns 19%(92) 484
modified
nouns 39% (563) 1447
Mean Number of cases
The / s / of unmodified nouns is only
moderatelydeletedbut the deletionof Is/
of modifiednouns is high. The difference
could be due to an interactionof the two
constraints:positionand length.Unmodi-
fied nounsare, of course,in the first posi-
tion of a noun phrase;however,they are
all polysyllabic.Modifiednouns are both
redundant(withregardto pluralmarking)
and polysyllabic.10
The deletion rates of pronominal / s
are somewhathigher than for adjectival
/Is/.
TABLE 13: DELETION OF PRONOMINAL /s/
Non redundant 20% (50) 248
los, las, les 27% (33) 122
nos 18% (12) 66
ellos, ellas 8% (5) 66
Redundant
nosotros
85% (103) 121
Mean Number of cases
It is clear that the Is/ of nosotros, re-
dundantandpartof a polysyllabicword,is
freelydeletedwhile the nonredundant/ s /
of monosyllabic forms is deleted much
less. However, it is very instructiveto
comparedeletion rates of the nonredun-
dant monosyllabic forms and the non-
redundantpolysyllabicforms. The latter
(ellos, ellas) underwentdeletion much

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606 Tracy Terrell Hispania62 (December 1979)

ellos, and ellas is quite low lends support and low deletion (below 10070). These
to the belief that for plural /s/ the crucial categories are somewhat arbitrary but do
constraint is redundancy not length. If reflect more or less natural divisions in the
this is the case, however, it is curious that data.
the deletion rates for the nonredundant
object pronouns is as high as it is (1807%TABLE 14: DELETION OF /s/: SUMMARY
and 27%0/).I will offer the following tenta- High Deletion
tive explanation. I have defined redun- Redundant Pronominal / s / -nosotros 85%
dancy in terms of syntactic position for Lexical /s/ of entonces 78%
Polysyllabic Verbal /s/ (Tt/Nosotros) 65%
adjectives and nouns but in terms of Redundant Adjective and
morphological contrast for pronouns, ie., Nominal Plural /s/ 39%
the /s/ of los is not redundant because it Moderate Deletion
contrasts with the singular form /lo/. Lexical / s / ofpues 24%
However in terms of its function and posi- Polysyllabic Lexical /Is 23%
tion in the sentence, the object pronouns Object Pronouns -los, las, les, nos 19%
normally repeat some given element and Unmodified Nouns 19%
Second Position Adjectival s/
presumably the speakers have established 18%7o
its number. For example, in the following Monosyllabic Lexical / s / 13%
Low Deletion
interchange the meaning of lo(s) is per-
The Pronouns ellos, ellas
fectly clear. D6nde pusihte loh libro0? 8%7
Monosyllabic Verbal I/s/ (Tti, es) 4%
LoO puse en la mesa. 'Where did you put First Position Plural Marker 3%
the books? I put them on the table'. Even Lexical /s/ of mds 3%
the pronoun nos 'us' is normally under-
standable without the final /Is/: No(s) As a general description we will say
quedamo(s) por tre(s) hora(s) (positive) that normal phonological deletion for this
vs. No no(s) quedamo(s) por md(s) de group of informants is about one quarter
tre(s) hora(s). 'We stayed (ourselves) for of all cases. The two constraining factors
three hours.' 'We didn't stay (ourselves) are length (for verb and lexical /s/) and
for more than three hours.' Thus redundancy (for plural / s /). The process
although the morphological contrast is is favored in redundant and/or poly-
valid syntactically there are few occasions syllabic forms and restricted in non-
in which the /Is/ is absolutely necessary. redundant and /or monosyllabic forms.
On the contrary, the subject pronouns Of the forms to which deletion applies
much more often carry by themselves the most are three specific morphemes: the
relevant semantic distinction. This is pronoun nosotros 'we', the word entonces
especially important in single word 'then' and the first person plural mor-
answers. QuiWn?Ella(s). 'Who?' 'They'. pheme -mos 'we'. /s/ is also freely
('She'.) deleted in the case of a redundant (non
In summary, then we have seen that first position) plural morpheme. Deletion
either length or redundancy accounts for is avoided by the speakers of this group in
the patterns of deletion in the noun phrase the monosyllabic lexical form mds 'more'
but that on closer examination of the in monosyllabic verb forms, especially
crucial cases in which both factors may be es 'is', and in the nonredundant (first
present, that redundancy is the primary position) plural marker."
constraint on the deletion of plural Is/.
Retention of /s/.
Deletion: Summary Let us now turn to a description and
The following chart displays the major partial explanation of the choice between
classes discussed and makes a threeway sibilant and aspirated allophones for the
classification: high deletion (30%o to phoneme / s / when it is not deleted. Table
100%7),moderate deletion (10%oto 30%)) 3 showed that sibilant retention is

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 Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish
governed by the phonological context. I
could also present data to show that the
choice between aspiration and sibilance is
not affected (with a single exception
which we will examine) by grammatical
class or function. This is logical if we con-
sider that the choice between an aspirated
phone and a sibilant phone cannot in any
way affect the grammatical or morpho-
logical system as in either case the
phonetic manifestation of the phoneme
remains audible.
The effect of the following segment on
sibilant retention may be expressed as a
variable ordering relationship: a sibilant
is retained most before a pause (no seg-
ment), less before a vowel and least before
a consonant.
The rate of sibilant retention in pre-
vocalic position was 18%. However,
further investigation reveals that this
figure is the average of two very different
rule application rates for two different
categories. Cedergren had discovered that
the position of stress in the word which
follows the final / s / conditions aspiration
if that word begins with a vowel. Table
15 demonstrates that a following stressed
vowel is a positive factor in the retention
of a sibilant for Cuban speakers also.
TABLE 15: SIBILANT RETENTION IN
PREVOCALIC POSITION
unstressed
vowel 19% (92) 484
stressed vowel 39% (563) 1447
Mean Number of cases
The situation is more complex than these
figures indicate, however. In Table 16 the
cases of / s / followed by a vowel are
classified according to the function of
Is/.
TABLE 16: SIBILANT RETENTION IN
NOUN MODIFIERS
modifier + stressed
vowel 275 (total)
47%o (130)
first position
modifier + v 89%o(101) 113
others + V 18%0(29) 162
modifier +
unstressed vowel 10% (106) 1025 (total)
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607
first position
modifier + V 19% (31) 166
others + V 9% (75) 859
The data clearly indicate that the combi-
nation of a determiner followed by a
stressed vowel results in the retention of
sibilance almost categorically.12 Ex-
amples: los otros 'the others', mis hijos
'my sons', los lUnicos 'the only ones',
muchos irboles 'many trees', etc.
Explanation
The system of constraints on aspiration
and deletion of syllable and word final
/s/ is fairly complex but certainly does
not strike one as "unlearnable" by native
speakers. However, a description of the
phenomenon is not really enough; we
should try to use the data to develop an
explanation as to how this system evolved
in Cuban Spanish. Such an explanation is
facilitated by data from other dialects
which reflect the same general processes
but presumably in different stages of
development. It is of course possible that
aspiration and deletion has and will con-
tinue to develop in different ways in
different areas. There is no obvious
reason to assume that there is now a
synchronic connection between aspiration
and deletion in Argentina, Andalucia,
Cuba, Venezuela, the Dominican Repub-
lic, Panama, and Puerto Rico. However,
it is striking that independent studies have
shown that the major direction of change
seems to be the same in all areas. In any
case we will assume this to be true and try
as best as possible to piece together a
diachronic explanation based on the
synchronic (and little diachronic) evidence
at hand.
Historically the process must have
taken the form s-*h-*0, ie., aspiration
and then deletion. The first step, aspira-
tion can result phonetically from a relax-
ation of the sibilant articulation. The
Spanish sibilant is produced by the air
flow between the blade of the tongue (in
some areas the tongue tip is used) and the
alveolar ridge. If the articulatory gesture
608 Tracy Terrell
for the production of I/s/ is relaxed, less
contact will take place and the result will
be glottal friction [h] mixed with sibi-
lance [s]; the amount of residual sibilance
will be determined by the closeness of the
tongue to the alveolar ridge in the relaxed
mode of articulation. These mixed phones
are still heard frequently in many areas
and are somewhat common in the combi-
nation /-st-/ even in Cuban speech.13
On independent grounds we would
expect that the weakening process which
produced aspirated phones would occur
first in preconsonantal syllable final posi-
tion since phonetically this is the position
in which consonants tend to weaken in all
languages and, in particular, throughout
the history of the Spanish language, conso-
nants have been subject to weakening
processes in syllable final position. There
is of course historical evidence to docu-
ment this first step as a change probably
dating from the eighteenth century.14
What is more difficult to determine is
whether there was a subsequent spread to
word final preconsonantal position
immediately or if there was some delay.
We also do not know if the weakening
process led immediately to deletion.
While there is some evidence for deletion
from the earliest dates, it is also logical to
assume that the aspiration of / s / may
have passed relatively unnoticed, since it
did not affect the morphological or gram-
matical systems and hence had no affect
on communication. It was probably dele-
tion of /s/ which aroused interest in the
process and caused scribes to make errors
in their work. On the other hand, in
Argentinian Spanish, probably the most
conservative of the aspiration and dele-
tion dialects, the rate of deletion is still
low and indeed some speakers delete very
little. There are even reports of speakers
with no deletion in their speech at all.'5 It
is probably impossible for a speaker who
aspirates never to delete; however, the
fact remains that there are cases of
speakers with only sporadic deletion. This
synchronic evidence argues that the
adoption of aspiration was indeed inde-
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Hispania62 (December 1979)
pendent and preceded the adoption of
deletion.
If the first stages of adoption was aspi-
ration in preconsonantal position, then
there may still exist conservative dialects
in which the sibilant is retained almost
categorically before a vowel and before a
pause, since the spread of aspirated
phones to these positions must have been
later. In more advanced dialects this fact
would be reflected as a variable con-
straint on phonological context for the
choice between aspiration and sibilant
retention. The former is the description of
the state of these processes in the educated
speech of Buenos Aires.'6 The use of the
two allophones (sJ and 1th is for portehios
almost in complementary distribution:
the sibilant is used before a vowel (las
intenciones 'the intentions') and before a
pause (ganamos 'we won') while the
phoneme is aspirated before a consonant
(las flores 'the flowers'). The second pre-
diction is of course born out in the data
from Cuban Spanish as well as in the
educated speech of other areas of the
Caribbean. In all of these areas the use of
sibilant and aspirated phones is variable
and conditioned by the following seg-
ment: a following consonant favors aspi-
ration, a following vowel favors aspira-
tion but admits some retention of sibi-
lance; and a following pause favors the
sibilant. The phonological constraints are
ordered in this way in all dialects of
Spanish in which this phenomenon has
been studied quantitatively.
One question which must be answered
is why aspiraticn spread to prevocalic and
prepausal position. There are two con-
siderations which might support such an
extension. The first is related to rule gen-
eralization. If the form of the rule of
aspiration were at first as in (1):
(1) s-*h/ [+ consonant]
an extension to prevocalic position would
result in a generalization as in (2):
(2) s--*h/_ [+ segment]
This rule would exclude application
before pause. An extension to prepausal
 Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish
position would result in an even simpler
rule.
(3) s--h/_ # higher rates before consonants, less
This is, of course, simply a reflection of
the tendency to reduce allomorphy. If, in
the first stages, as currently represented in
Argentinian Spanish, there was comple-
mentary distribution of the sibilant and
aspirated phones, this would result in a
regular phonetic distribution, but every
word which ends in / s / would have two
forms according to the phonetic context
in which it appeared. If the rule of aspira-
tion were to be applied in all contexts, the
forms could be restructured and the allo-
morphy would disappear. This has not yet
happened in the educated dialect of Cuba,
but it may be a partial explanation for the
extension of aspiration to prevocalic and
prepausal position. What remains to be
explained is the effect of pause. For the
speakers of this investigation the majority
of cases of prepausal / s / is still rendered
as a sibilant.'7 An examination of the
individual speakers of this group reveals
that it is precisely in this position that
there is the greatest amount of individual
variation the range of s -retention being
from 7%0to 98%.18 It should also be re-
called that in more formal styles in which
observers have consistently reported more
[s] retention there are always more pauses
and time for reflection. Could it be that in
prepausal position many speakers con-
sciously or semiconsciously reinsert a
sibilant which in normal contexts would
have been aspirated or deleted? Whatever
the explanation turns out to be, it remains
a fact that prepausal position is a strong
constraint favoring sibilant retention for
Cuban speakers in this investigation.
As I have stated, it is impossible to
determine if deletion was an immediate
consequence of aspiration. In any case, it
could not have been delayed too long
since practically it is difficult to maintain
one's speech with a high number of aspi-
rations in syllable and word final position
without at least sporadic deletion. If the
process began early then the same pho-
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609
netic constraints which governed aspira-
tion should have applied to deletion:
before vowels and even less before a
pause. This is indeed the case for porteho
educated speakers; it is emphatically not
the case for educated speakers in the
Caribbean (cf, Table 3).19 The explana-
tion for this difference I believe lies in the
more advanced stage of development in
the Caribbean. The rates of deletion in
porteho Spanish are still relatively low
(about 150%)while in Caribbean Spanish
they average about from 26% in this in-
vestigation, 29% in Puerto Rican, 35% in
Venezuelan, and 50% in Panamanian
(includes all socio-economic classes of
speakers). The same grammatical con-
straints which apply to Cuban Spanish
were found for other speakers of Carib-
bean Spanish: educated speakers tend to
preserve first plural marker in the noun
phrase and the / s / of monosyllabic
forms. However, in porteho Spanish
these constraints are somewhat weaker
and interact with the constraints of the
phonological context, ie., more deletion
before a consonant, less before a vowel
and a pause. I believe that this difference
may be explained as follows. When the
rule of deletion is first adopted, it is
simply a weakening of aspiration h- 0
and as such it follows the general phonetic
conditioning described above. However,
when it is adopted by more and more
speakers who apply it more and more
often, the danger of misunderstanding
increases and some effort (unconscious)
is made to preserve the phonetic sub-
stance of monosyllabic words and to pre-
serve some morphological indication of
plurality in the noun phrase. As the rates
of deletion increase in subsequent genera-
tions, these functional constraints become
more and more important and the original
phonological conditioning is easily
obscured and lost. This is apparently the
stage of educated Caribbean Spanish in
which phonological context plays little or
no role in conditioning the rule of / s /
deletion.
610 Tracy Terrell
There are reports of dialects in which
deletion of / s / has progressed to the point
that a rule of vowel laxing (and perhaps
lengthening) has replaced I/s/ to indicate
plurality. This is certainly not the case for
educated speech in any of the aspiration
and deletion countries of the Americas.
Whether such a system will develop
remains to be seen; there is some evidence
that it will not. Informal experience and
some direct work with the Spanish of illit-
erate and semi-illiterate Dominicans leads
me to believe that many speakers in the
Dominican Republic have speech with
completely restructured lexicons, in which
no word ends in / s /. That is, / s / deletion
had advanced to the stage in which it
applied almost categorically, and subse-
quent generations simply dropped the
deletion rule and restructured the lexicon.
The important point is that there has been
no restructuring of the vowel system to
accomodate this loss. Only detailed
studies of Dominican speech will reveal
the sorts of morphological and syntactical
adjustments which have been made to
preserve the notion of plurality.20
REALIZE THAT THE TENTATIVE expla-
nations offered in this paper for the
development of the phonological proc-
esses of aspiration and deletion are only
a beginning. In the search for expla-
nations of sound change and other
phonological phenomena, one traditional
solution was to resort to all kinds of extra-
linguistic criteria: race, climate, social
change, etc. Although most of these
criteria have long since been shown to be
invalid, investigations by Labov2' and
others have indicated that certain extra-
linguistic factors indeed to play a role in
the adoption and spread of phonological
innovations. Modern linguistics, how-
ever, has mostly concentrated on explana-
tion in terms of linguistic causes.
On a phonemic level, Martinet22intro-
duced the notions of "push chains" and
"drag chains." Standard generative
phonology concentrated on the develop-
ment of the ideas of "formal" simplicity
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Hispania62 (December 1979)
and "significant linguistic generaliza-
tion." Others have dealt with the notions
of "functional" explanation. Kiparsky23
argues that "the study of the formal
properties of phonological systems has
progressed to a point where it may be
possible to return, with much greater
precision and generality than could be
achieved before, to these traditional
functionalist questions."
In this paper we have been concerned
with this type of explanation, in particu-
lar, with what Kiparsky calls "distinct-
ness" conditions, which describe the
tendency for semantically relevant infor-
mation to be retained in the surface
structure. Kiparsky points out that
"retention of functional information in
surface structure would appear to be
motivated by the requirements of speech
perception and the elimination of allo-
morphy in paradigms by language acqui-
sition." Further work with aspiration and
deletion should clarify the sociolinguistic
constraints in various areas of the
Spanish-speaking world in order to
amplify our knowledge of how a sound
change spreads through a given society,
and especially in this case throughout
several societies widely separated in time
and distance.
NOTES
'D. L. Canfield, La pronunciaci6n del espahol en
America(Bogota:InstitutoCaro y Cuervo, 1962).
2Roxana Ma and Elenor Herasimchuk,"The
Linguistic Dimensions of a Bilingual Neighbor-
hood," in Bilingualismin the Barrio, eds. J. A.
Fishman,R. L. Cooper,and R. Ma (Bloomington,
Indiana:IndianaUniversityPress, 1971).
3Seealso a paralleldiscussionin somewhatmore
detail in HenriettaCedergren,"The Interplayof
Social and LinguisticFactorsin Panama," Ph.D.
dissertation,(Ithaca,New York:CornellUniversity,
1973).
4For details and backgroundsee Juan Lope-
Blanch, "El proyectode estudio coordinadode la
norma ling0isticaculta de las principalesciudades
de iberoambricay de la peninsula iberica (su
desarrolloy estado actual)," in El simposio de
Mexico: Actas, informes y comunicaciones (Mexico.
Universidad Nacional A utonoma de Mexico, 1969),
pp. 222-23.The interviewerfor the Cubantapeswas
 Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish
B. Vallejo-Claros. The co-directors of the Cuban
phase of the project are Professors Humberto
L6pez Morales and Joseph Matluck. A special note
of thanks goes to Professor Haden of the University
of Texas who so kindly supplied the transcripts for
these interviews without which an already long
project would have been even more difficult.
WVerydetailed studies of the phonetic output of
the rule of aspiration are found in TomBs Navarro-
Tomds, El espafiol en Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras,
1948).
6See also Ma and Herasimchuk, op.cit. and
Cedergren, op. cit. Cedergren included glottal stop
as a manifestation of the 0 category whereas I
included it in the h group. This must be kept in
mind when making direct comparisons of deletion
rates of the two studies.
7The tabulation was done through the use of
SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) on
the SIGMA 7 (Xerox) at the University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine. For details on the program used
(CROSSTABS) consult the SPSS Manual, Norman
Nie, C. Hadlai Hull, Jean G. Jenkins, Karin Stein-
brenner and Dale H. Bent, (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1970 and 1975). A special word of thanks goes
to Karen Anderson and Kathy Smith who helped
write the program and to adapt the Spanish data to
the SPSS program and to Jeanne Egasse who helped
punch the data on computer cards.
"For further discussion of the problem of deter-
mining the relationship between statistical and lin-
guistic significance in quantitative phonological
studies see T. Terrell, "Observations on the Rela-
tionships between Group and Individual Variation
in the Development of Constraints on Variable
Rules," Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting
of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (Berkeley,
California, 1977), pp. 535-44.
'The treatment of verbal /Is/ and lexical /Is/ as
one category attending only to length is documented
also for educated Puerto Rican speakers in T.
Terrell, "Sobre la aspiraci6n y elisi6n de /s/ final en
el espanfol de Puerto Rico," Nueva Revista de
Filologia Hispdnica XXVII, 1978, Nfim. 1, pdgs. 24-
38, and also for educated speakers of Caracas,
Venezuela, in T. Terrell, "Aspiration and Deletion
of Word Final /Is/ in the Spanish of Caracas,
Venezuela," Paper presented to the Hispanic Collo-
quium, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, July, 1977.
1On the other hand, unmodified nouns are
normally unambiguously plural. Compare, for
example, esto es para niflo(s) 'this is for child
(children)' with esto es para un nifo 'this is for a
child'.
"The conspiracy to preserve an overt morphologi-
cal plural marker in the noun phrase is discussed
somewhat in Ma and Herasimchuk, op.cit. and in
Cedergren, op.cit. The only hint I have found in the
traditional literature of such a constraint is a note in
Garcia Cotorruelo's study of the Spanish of Carga-
gena, Spain, "Estudio sobre el habla de Carta-
gena," Anejos del Boletin de la Real Academia
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611
Espahola, III (Madrid, 1959). In this article he notes
that (translation mine) "complete loss is not
frequent except in plurals preceded by articles; in
this case the final aspiration of nouns or adjectives
disappears."
'2This is an example of the nonindependent inter-
action of variable constraints. See H. Cedergren and
D. Sankoff, "Variable Rules: Performance as a
Statistical Reflection of Competence," Language
50:2 (June 1974), pp. 333-54. This interaction of the
/s/ of a determiner followed by a stressed vowel is
also a constraint on aspiration and deletion of /s/
in Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, but not in
Argentina.
'3See the discussion in B. J. Longmire, "The
Relationship of Variables in Venezuelan Spanish to
Historical Sound Changes in Latin and the Romance
Languages," Ph.D. dissertation, (Washington,
D.C.: Georgetown University, 1976).
'"Amado Alonso reports that aspiration of -s is
documented for the 19th century and probably was
adopted in the second half of the 18th century, in
Estudios linguisticos: Temas hispanoamericanos,
(Madrid Gredos, 1967), p. 264. D. L. Canfield, on
the other hand, claims that "there seems to be evi-
dence of the loss or aspiration of /Is/ syllable final
about 1600. .. ." "The Diachronic Dimension of
'Synchronic' Hispanic Dialectology," Linguistics
7 (July 1964), pp. 5-9. Maximiliano Jim6nez Sabater
found evidence for /Is/ deletion in Santo Domingo
dating from 1696, in Mds datos sobre el espafol de
la Reptiblica Dominicana (Santo Domingo, Domini-
can Republic: Instituto Tecnol6gico de Santo
Domingo, 1975), pp. 34-35.
'SBeatriz Fontanella de Weinburg, "Comporta-
miento ante -s de hablantes femeninos y masculinos
del espafnol bonarense," Romance Philology,
XXVII (1973), No. 1, pp. 50-58.
'6T. Terrell, "La aspiraci6n y elisi6n de /Is/ en el
espafiol portefio," Anuario de Letras XVI (1978).
'7There are several points which require an expla-
nation which I cannot give at this time. Why does
prepausal position condition -s retention even more
than prevocalic position: This does not seem to be
the case for French which underwent s-deletion
several centuries ago. See also the discussion in
T. Terrell and B. Tranel, "Parallelisms between
Liaison in French and /s/ Aspiration and Deletion
in Spanish Dialects," Etudes linguistiques sur les
langues romanes, Montreal Working Papers in Lin-
guistics, Vol. 10, (November 1978), Universit6 de
Montreal. But it does seem to be the case for
English. See G. Guy, "Variation in the Group and
the Individual: the Case of Final Stop Deletion,"
Pennsylvania Working Papers: Linguistic Change
and Variation, Vol. 1:4. Secondly, why does stress
on the following vowel conditions s-retention so
strongly in so many dialects. No similar constraint
has been posited for French and only indirectly for
English. See Guy, op.cit., pp. 15-16.
'ST. Terrell, "La aspiraci6n en el espanol de
Cuba: Observaciones te6ricas," Revista de Linguis-
612 Tracy Terrell Hispania62 (December 1979)

tica Te6rica y Aplicada vol. 13 (1975), pp. 93-107. AnnualCaribbeanDialectConference,"Los efectos

19Theseresults are contrary to the hypothesis de la reestructuracifnfon~micade /s/ en el habla
advancedby W. Labov in his "Methodology,"in dominicana,"in SanGerman,PuertoRico (Univer-
A Survey of Linguistic Science, ed., W. Dingwall sidad Interamericana), April, 1979.This paperwill
(CollegePark, Maryland:Universityof Maryland, be publishedin the Actas of that symposium.
1971), pp. 413-79. For further discussion see T. 2'W. Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Phila-
Terrell,"Constraintson Final ConsonantDeletion: delphia, Pennsylvania:Universityof Pennsylvania
Evidence from Spanish," The Canadian Journal of Press, 1972).
Linguistics,22:2, 1977, pp. 156-68,and T. Terrell, 22AMartinet, Economie des changements phone-
"FunctionalConstraintson the Deletion of Word tiques(Bern:A. Francke,1955).
Final I/s/ in Cuban Spanish," Papers from the First 23PaulKiparsky,"Explanationin Phonology,"
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society in Goals of Linguistic Theory, ed., Stanley Peters
B L S Vol. 1, (Berkeley,California:Universityof (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
California,1975),pp. 431-37. 1972).
201 presenteda preliminaryreportto the Fourth

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