Spanish 3120 / 5120
Spanish Pronunciation and Phonetics
Annual course taught in Spanish
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Pronunciación de la lengua española para anglohablantes
version 4.1
copyright © 2001-2008
Richard E. Morris
Target audience
Pronunciación de la lengua española para anglohablantes is designed to help students of Spanish improve their pronunciation. Its targeted reader is the native English-speaking undergraduate student pursuing a major or minor in Spanish, who has little or no knowledge of linguistics or phonetics of either English or Spanish. In general, such a student has recently completed an introductory course track (2 years; 4 semesters) in Spanish language and grammar – and therefore has limited reading experience in Spanish – and now seeks to refine his or her pronunciation over the long term. Many college undergraduate programs offer a semester course in Spanish phonetics; this text has been written with such courses specifically in mind. For maximum benefit, the course should be taken early in the curriculum before poor pronunciation habits have had a chance to take root.
The text is of equal value to native Spanish-speaking teachers of Spanish, as the materials provide useful strategies for diagnosing pronunciation problems, suggestions for remedying these problems, and numerous practical tips that may be adapted and incorporated into a standard language lesson.
The text aims to fill three significant market gaps:
· It is written in Spanish, and as such is one of just a handful of texts suited to college Spanish programs that require junior- and senior-level courses to be conducted in Spanish and to use Spanish-language course materials. The vast majority of college Spanish phonetics texts available today are in English;
· It is keyed to the linguistic skill level of students with limited Spanish reading ability (four semesters). This allows it to be placed early in the course sequence and therefore promote the development of good pronunciation habits when such development is most crucial;
· It is designed to be completed within a single semester. In a class that meets three times per week, three class periods can be allotted to each pronunciation topic so as to ensure a good first pass, thorough review, and ample in-class practice.
Special features
In addition to these primary aims, the text offers several unique features that make it readily accessible both to students and instructors.
First, the text has a therapeutic focus. Each chapter begins with a presentation of a phonetic topic or issue. The remaining chapter content provides specific information about pronunciation problems that are common for English speakers, and offers guidelines to diagnose and remedy these problems. For example, in Chapter 12 students are guided through a self-check exercise in order to verify whether or not they “aspirate” the consonants /p, t, k/. Although common in English, aspiration sounds quite unnatural to the native Spanish ear. Students are shown the physical effect of aspiration in an English word like poppa but not in the similar Spanish word papá. Students are invited to gauge their degree of aspiration by hanging a strip of paper in front of their lips and pronouncing certain key words and phrases. English-style pronunciation makes the strip fly up; Spanish-style pronunciation does not. The advantage of this type of exercise is that it provides the student with an on-the-spot ability assessment.
Second, the text makes extensive use of side-by-side comparison to illustrate key principles and contrasts between English and Spanish. For each word pair, students are guided to pronounce the English word first, then the Spanish word. For example: yellow / hielo. This task has therapeutic benefit as either an ear-training exercise or an articulation exercise. As an ear-training exercise (listening and repeating after the instructor), the student isolates the essential differences between the English and Spanish pronunciations and learns to be attentive to these differences, first aurally and then in actual production. As an articulation exercise, the student will find that the English word “distracts” by forcing him to use English phonology. To pronounce the Spanish word, the English phonology must first be inhibited and the Spanish phonology accessed. This continual accessing of the Spanish phonology helps the student learn to make purposeful articulatory decisions in production, that later become second nature.
Third, the text includes a wealth of oral exercises. In addition to practicing isolated words and sentences, students are challenged to “try their tongue” at tongue twisters as well as converse in pairs and small groups for more real-world practice of various phonetic features.
Contents
Pronunciación de la lengua española para anglohablantes consists of sixteen chapters and is thus designed to fit comfortably into a standard college semester without any need to rush or cut material. With one week allotted per chapter, students in a three-hour class are allowed ample time to learn, review, and practice the material – in class. A summary of the chapters follows.
The Introduction lays out the goals of the book as well as the three components of a “native-sounding” accent: sound, intonation, and rhythm. It concludes with a preliminary ear-training exercise in differences between English and Spanish pronunciations of American place names, such as Arizona, San Francisco, Amarillo.
Chapter 1 introduces the basics of Spanish sound-spelling correspondence and explains the usefulness of a phonetic alphabet in studying pronunciation. The concepts of phoneme and allophone are also introduced.
Chapter 2 introduces the essentials of consonant articulation, including the three coordinates by which consonants are classified phonetically: point of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing. Dialectal differences are briefly surveyed.
Chapter 3 addresses the vowel system of Spanish and its phonetic description, with special emphasis on differences between the vowels of American English and the vowels of Standard Spanish, in particular the English schwa.
Chapter 4 looks at four common “traps” that English-speaking students should avoid as they perfect their pronunciation of Spanish vowels. These include vowel centralization, tense vowel diphthongization, u-diphthongization, and vowel laxing. Exercises focus on ear-training and avoidance of these traps.
Chapter 5 explains how semivowels and semiconsonants are derived from vowels in everyday usage.
Chapter 6 introduces word syllabification and proposes six basic rules of syllabification for Spanish. Exercises focus on word division and how these divisions affect pronunciation.
Chapter 7 explains word stress, and shows how the stress pattern of a word may be known for sure as long as one knows how it is spelled. This same principle, applied in reverse, can assist in determining the need for diacritical marks in spelling – a skill commonly deficient even among even advanced learners of Spanish.
Chapter 8 revisits the topic of stress as it applies at the level of the phrase or sentence. Stressed grammatical categories are presented, as are some of the insights that have guided the spellings of homophones (de/dé, que/qué, tu/tú, etc.).
Chapter 9 examines syllabification at the phrase level. The rules presented in chapter 4 are revisited and broadened. For example, the same principle that divides the word Laura as [láu–ra] also divides the words la unión as [lau–nión].
Chapter 10 examines syllable merger (synalepha/sinalefa) as a common effect in conversational speech. Phonetic criteria determine when neighboring vowels reduce or delete. To emphasize the fact that syllable merger is stylistic in nature, a careful distinction is retained between careful and relaxed speech.
Chapter 11 introduces the voiced stop series /b, d, g/, which can be pronounced as stops or fricatives, depending on contextual phonetic criteria. Students learn these criteria and practice applying them in usage.
Chapter 12 examines the unvoiced stop series /p, t, k/, particularly the tendency of English speakers to aspirate these sounds in certain phonetic contexts: [ph, t5h, kh]. The chapter addresses this tendency with a practical self-check exercise as well as examples of both aspirated and unaspirated stop sounds in English.
Chapter 13 looks at the phonetics of the liquid consonants and their difficulty for English-speakers, particularly the “dark-l”, which is one of the strongest markers of an English accent.
Chapter 14 introduces the unvoiced fricative phonemes and the difficulties these sounds can cause in pronunciation as well as spelling. The pronunciations of spelled s in English are numerous: president, erosion, tension; these English spellings tend to trigger mispronunciation of Spanish words. Exercises and examples in this chapter focus on eliminating these unacceptable variants in Spanish words in which mispronunciation is especially likely (presidente, erosión, tensión, etc.).
Chapter 15 examines the palatal /y/ and explores how this phoneme differs from the English sound in yes and say. It discusses fricativization and affrication of this phoneme, as well as fortition of initial /i/..
Chapter 16 presents the palatal phonemes /c^/ and /ñ/, focusing on key pronunciation differences with English.
Chapter 17 introduces the principle of place assimilation, whereby a nasal consonant such as /n/ “agrees” variably with the point of articulation of the consonant immediately after it, either in the same word or the next word.
In summary, Pronunciación de la lengua española para anglohablantes is an essential yet complete course in Spanish pronunciation improvement, and is designed for regular classroom use. Its format, style, and sequencing make it readily accessible to both the teacher and the student.
A note on “standard” language
The Spanish language is dialectally diverse, and choosing which dialectal features to present as “standard” in an applied phonetics text is no easy task. This text adopts Mexican Spanish – specifically the inland variety associated with Mexico City – as standard. This decision reflects the tradition for Spanish language textbooks published in the United States and also the demographic reality in this country: at the time of the 2000 National Census, 66% of the 33 million Latino residents of the United States were of Mexican origin. Mexican Spanish is therefore the variety most likely to be heard in interactions with Hispanics in the United States.
The Mexican variety has the added advantage of being regionally neutral. This means that the essential phonetic features of Mexican Spanish tend to represent an “international” dialect heard in educated speech throughout Latin America. By focusing on a regionally neutral dialect, this text aims to furnish the English speaker with the best possible access to Spanish as a world language, specifically for purposes of studying, teaching, and employment.
Some discussions in the text make reference to other regional dialects of Spanish, such as Castilian, Caribbean, Central American, Andean, and Southern Cone. Although these regions are far from linguistically homogenous, they do provide a basic framework for introducing the student to the geographic diversity of the Spanish language.
Further reading
Alarcos Llorach, E. 1965. Fonología española. 4th ed. Madrid: Gredos.
Harris, James W. 1969. Spanish Phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
----------. 1970. Sequences of vowels in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry 1: 129-135.
----------. 1983. Syllable structure and stress in Spanish. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hualde, José Ignacio. 1994. La contracción silábica en español. In V. Demonte (ed.), Gramática del español. Mexico City: Colegio de México. 629-647.
----------. 1989. Procesos consonánticos y estructuras geométricas en español. Lingüística ALFAL 1: 7-44.
Ladefoged, Peter. 2005. A Course in Phonetics. 5th ed. New York: Wadsworth.
Lipski, John M. 1994. Latin American Spanish. London: Longman.
Moreno de Alba, José G. 1994. La pronunciación del español en México. Mexico City: Colegio de México.
----------. 2003. La lengua española en México. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Perissonotto, Giorgio. 1975. Fonología del español hablado en la ciudad de México: Ensayo de un método sociolingüístico. Mexico City: Colegio de México.
Quilis, Antonio. 1993. Tratado de fonololgía y fonética españolas. Madrid: Gredos.
---------- & Joseph A. Fernández. 1969. Curso de fonética y fonología españolas para estudiantes angloamericanos. 4th ed. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Roca, Iggy. 1991. Stress and syllables in Spanish. In F. Martínez Gil & H. Campos (eds.), Current Studies in Spanish Linguistics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 599-635.
Zamora Munné, Juan C. & Jorge M. Guitart. 1982. Dialectología hispanoamericana: Teoría, descripción, historia. Salamanca: Ediciones Almar.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Óscar Díaz Ortiz, Nuria Novella, and Paolo Volpe Rinonapoli for reviewing the text and suggesting stylistic improvements at various stages.
Richard E. Morris
Middle Tennessee State University
May 2008
The text is available to currently enrolled students only.
The link below will take you to the eLearn homepage. Enter your eLearn username and password (same as your PipelineMT username and password), then select SPAN 3120 and "Content." The chapters of the text display as clickable PDF files.
Copyright © 2008 by Richard E. Morris
All rights reserved.