Hitz-bukaerako herskariak: kontsonante talkak

Abstract

In Basque word-final stop consonants have very low lexical frequency, but very high token frequency in discourse, since final /-t/ and /-k/ appear in very common suffixes. Here we undertake an acoustic investigation of the phonetic realization of word-final stops, with a focus on consonant clusters that arise across word boundaries. Our analysis is based on a corpus of conversational speech. Measurements of relative intensity show that such clusters are usually greatly reduced. A more detailed spectrographic analysis confirms a tendency for /-k/ and /-t/ to be deleted or reduced to approximants preconsonantally. On the other hand, the devoicing phenomena reported in the dialectological literature (e.g. /k#b/ --> [p]) appear to be infrequent.