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Hispanic Linguistics at the Crossroads: Theoretical linguistics, language acquisition and language contact
Edited by Rachel Klassen, Juana M. Liceras and Elena Valenzuela
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 4] 2015
► pp. 251–268

An experimental approach to hypercorrection in Dominican Spanish

| The University of Texas
| The University of Texas

A stigmatized trait of popular Dominican Spanish is the insertion of pre-consonantal or final [s] into a lexical item (e.g. Ja[s]queline). The predominant explanation among phonologists for this uniquely Dominican phenomenon is that the uneducated are ‘lost-s’ speakers who do not know which words contain lexical /s/ so they insert [s] into any coda, subject to theoretical constraints (Núñez Cedeño, 1988a; Harris, 2002; Bradley, 2006). However, a sociolinguistic analysis of rural Dominicans revealed that the majority of ‘s-ful’ tokens realized in spontaneous speech were correct productions (Bullock et al., 2014). The present analysis reports the results of a follow-up, controlled study designed to assess whether speakers could perceive and correctly reproduce coda [s] equally well across different phonological contexts, or whether internal and external factors (gender, literacy, age) affect how a speaker lexically codes and produces novel ‘s-ful’ tokens.

Keywords: Dominican Republic, hypercorrection, insertion, intrusion, s-deletion, Spanish
Published online: 30 July 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.4.13bul
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