Pronunciation of syllable-final /r/ in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

This thesis presents an analysis of the variants of syllable-final /r/ in the spontaneous speech of nine native speakers of Dominican Spanish in order to determine whether these speakers have a tendency to produce weakened variants of this phoneme and to determine the linguistic factors that affect the production of a given variant. A weakened variant is defined in this thesis as one in which articulatory movement is reduced, so that [h], [^], [j] and [l_l], that is, [l] preceding another [l], are the weakened variants of /r/ attested in the speech of the informants. An analysis of the data showed that weakened variants occur at a rate of 24% in the sample as a whole and at a rate of 34% in word-final position, whether pre-pausal or phrase-internal, and at a rate of 47% at the end of infinitives.