Language Contact in Majorca: An Experimental Sociophonetic Approach

341 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.The results show evidence of contact-induced change in progress in the intonation of Spanish in particular. That is, the results suggest that Spanish-dominant Majorcan bilinguals are progressively borrowing Catalan-like intonation into their Spanish. This was true for both the intonation of declaratives and absolute interrogatives. On the other hand, the intonation of Catalan seems to remain mostly unaffected. Regarding segmental phonetics, on the other hand, there seems to be a tendency for some speakers towards develarizing alveolar laterals in Catalan, which were traditionally very velarized. This means that there is some evidence suggesting that Catalan-dominant females, but not males, borrow Spanish-like laterals into their Catalan. We propose that the difference in the direction of cross-linguistic transfer is partially motivated by the relative degree of social salience and/or stigmatization of each individual phonetic feature. The relevance of these findings for language contact research is discussed.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD