Prosodic features of a Spanish ludling

Danielle Lynne Reindl, Purdue University

Abstract

The reiterative epenthesis of a meaningless syllable or segment known as a crypteme is the mechanism that drives the Mexican ludling known as hablando con/por la ‘f’. The epenthetic material allows the speakers of the ludling to obscure ordinary Spanish by interrupting the continuity of the segmental material, but the suprasegmental material—specifically word stress—is also interrupted. Using phonetic analysis of the ludling, this study has demonstrated that ludlings do not maintain primary or secondary stress placement from ordinary Spanish to ludling-encrypted Spanish. Moreover, the three phonetic qualities of word stress (pitch, intensity, and duration) are not used in the same way within the ludling as they are used in ordinary Spanish. In particular, pitch, which linguists such as Monroy (1980) and Alcoba and Murillo (1998) believed to be the stress-producing mechanism in Spanish, is used to demarcate the boundary of the crypteme and can therefore be used to help ludling speakers to filter out the confounding material. Other linguists, like Navarro (1944 and 1957), have instead argued that intensity is phonetically responsible for marking stress, but in the present study, no evidence was found to support that claim, neither in the ludling data nor in the unencrypted Spanish control data. Finally, this thesis provides an evaluation of two contrasting theories on ludlings similar to the one studied. The work of Piñeros and of Botne and Davis offer differing hypotheses of how epenthetic ludling speakers produce encrypted speech, and using spectrographic analysis, the implications of each hypothesis are tested.

Degree

M.A.

Advisors

Niepokuj, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Linguistics

COinS