/s/-aspiration in River Plate Spanish: Tango vs. Rock

A look into the rate of /s/-aspiration in the songs, both tango and rock, performed by Andrés Calamaro with Germán Coloma, CEMA University, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Thursday, February 09, 2012
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Rolfe Hall 1301

In River Plate Spanish, pre-consonantal /s/-aspiration is standard, while weakening in word-final position before a vowel or a pause is somehow stigmatized. We assume here that speakers can partly control their rate of /s/-weakening to approach either the local standards or a Pan-Hispanic norm. To evaluate this hypothesis, we use a corpus of 17 songs grouped in two genres (tango and rock) and, for each genre, we compare the rate of /s/-aspiration in the songs performed by one singer (Andrés Calamaro) with the same songs sung by other interpreters. A multiple-regression analysis reveals that the variables ‘genre’ and ‘interpreter’ significantly predict the differences in the aspiration rates, and indicates that the same singer approaches the River Plate Spanish rates in the more local genre (tango) but converges towards a general norm in the more international genre(rock).

Cost : Free and open to the public

Download file: Coloma_2-9-12-or-rld.pdf

Sponsor(s): Center for Southern Cone Studies, Spanish and Portuguese