Las geminadas en el español habanero. Fonotáctica y restricciones

Abstract

The purpose of this article are: 1) to present a preliminary description of the phonotactic of the process of gemination in the habanero Spanish and 2) to show that a constraint based analysis could be considerated as an alternative to formalize and to organize facts of linguistic variation. Gemination is described in this work as a compensatory phonetic variation process that is the result of a more general process: assimilation. In this speech, geminates could appear as full geminates [ab.bol], as partial geminates [pa.ke] or as preaspirated geminates [pak.ke]. I propose five markedness and five faithfulness. Both of these constraints groups take into account the prosodic level, the segmental level and the distinctive feature structure. This way, the algorithm of the Optimality Theory shows that the full geminate is the optimal candidate.