Reduction in secondary grammaticalization: Evidence from the

Reduction in secondary grammaticalization:
Evidence from the Spanish periphrastic past
Chad Howe, University of Georgia
The correspondence between meaning and phonetic form has long been discussed in the
literature on grammaticalization, which maintains that elements with more abstract
(grammatical) meaning tend to be shorter and more reduced (Givón 1979, Bybee et al. 1994,
Lehmann 1995). In their analysis of tonal erosion in Sinitic languages, Ansaldo and Lim observe
that grammaticalized items “show phonetic erosion [reduction] when compared to their lexical
counterparts” and that this erosion is in fact “[o]ne of the salient aspects of the
grammaticalization process” (2002:345,360). Nevertheless, recent studies have questioned this
claim, observing that phonetic reduction is not necessarily linked to more abstract (i.e.
grammaticalized) meaning (see Amaral et al. 2013, Gradoville 2013). Following Traugott
(2002), the current study assumes a distinction between 'primary' and 'secondary'
grammaticalization, the latter referring to changes that do not involve a shift in grammatical
category but rather extension of semantic/pragmatic meaning. By analyzing patterns of phonetic
reduction of a form undergoing secondary grammaticalization, in this case the perfectivization of
the periphrastic past (or perfect) in Peninsular Spanish (see Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos
2008), I argue that reduction is not a "salient" feature of secondary grammaticalization.
Various studies, such as Bybee (2002), have shown that the rate of deletion (or
reduction/lenition) of intervocalic /d/ in Spanish is greater with participles than with other
lexical, non-grammaticalized classes (see also Blas Arroyo 2006). These analyses, based on
binary methods of discerning phonetic attrition, largely ignore the autonomy of the phonetic
processes in question, obfuscating what turn out to be patterns of erosion attested across all
relevant phonetic contexts--e.g., increased lenition with -ado sequences (vs. -ido). The current
analysis offers new evidence based on acoustic properties of Spanish intervocalic /d/, namely
comparison of relative intensities between d and the following vowel, and demonstrates that
sound change in morphosyntax is more gradient than observed by Bybee (2002, and others). The
data, comprised of -ado and -ido sequences, were extracted from a corpus of spoken Spanish
consisting of sociolinguistic interviews with speakers from Alcalá de Henares, Spain, a dialect in
which the periphrastic past displays the perfect to perfective development characteristic of other
Peninsular varieties (see Howe 2013). Using a mixed effects multivariate analysis in R (with
speaker as a random factor), I analyzed the distribution of intensity ratios for each token, as
demonstrated with the token he estado in Figure 1 below, where a value of 1 indicates no
observable lenition (not attested in the data) and 0 no observable acoustic presence of the /d/
(adapted from Hualde et al. 2010).
The quantitative analysis reveals no significant differences between the intensity ratios of the
participle tokens and those of other -ado/-ido contexts (e.g., in nouns), as demonstrated in the
box plot in Figure 2. The most operant factors in the statistical model are (i) the surrounding
vocalic context, with -ido tokens displaying significantly lower rates of /d/ reduction and (ii) the
frequency of the particular token, with high frequency elements showing greater /d/ reduction.
These findings support the claim that forms undergoing secondary grammaticalization—i.e.
those cases of change that specifically involve increased abstractness (e.g., the perfectivization of
the Spanish perfect)—pattern similarly to other, non-grammaticalizing elements in the grammar
in terms of their response to pressures of phonetic reduction. The results of the current study call
into question Ansaldo and Lim's claim regarding the general role of phonetic reduction in
linguistic change, suggesting instead that erosion in secondary change can be the result of factors
that are not correlated per se with the process of grammaticalization.
Figure 7: Normalized Intensity by Informant
Figure 8: Normalized Intensity by Part of Speech
Figure 1:
Figure 2:
Analysis
Intensity Ratio = Peak(V2) - Valley(d)
No significant effect for Part of Speech
Peak(V2)
The preferred method of analysis for this project is a regression model including
interaction. Initially, eight different categorical variables will be used as predictors of the
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