Acceso usuarios
Leioa, España
This paper analyses two 18th century texts and focuses on hypercorrections found in the spelling of sibilants, i.e. examples where an etymological apical fricative is repre-sented with spelling elsewhere used for laminal fricatives. The texts used are Lubieta’s diction-ary (written in the central variety of Donostia/San Sebastián) and sermons composed by Bizente Sarria (written in the western variety of Etxebarri). As for Lubieta’s text, in previous research hy-percorrections have been interpreted to be caused by an ongoing merger in which the apico-al-veolar fricative merges with the apico-laminal, and the remaining sound is the laminal. In Sar-ria’s speech, however, another merger pattern was present, in which laminal and apical fricatives merge in favour of the latter. Because of that, hypercorrections found in that text are hypothe-sised to be purely graphical. Using quantitative methods, the paper compares the patterns found in spellings in the two texts in order to better understand merger processes involved (and espe-cially hypercorrections), but also to reflect on the methodology which can be used to analyse such issues.
