Does meta-linguistic awareness play any role at the beginning of an ongoing sound change? The case of some vowel-ended verbs in Catalan

Abstract

As Ohala (1989) pointed out, in any language there exists variation in the pronunciation of words that is not recognized by speakers. Furthermore, several studies from subfields of linguistics and psychology (Preston, 1989; Markham, 1999; Williams, Garret and Coupland, 1999) provide evidence of individuals’ ability to perceive and encode the variability of what is heard around them. Apart from that, phonological awareness is an important part of the oral language acquisition process, which is directly related to schooling and learning grammar. Finally, as Labov (2001) stated, linguistic insecurity may be regarded as an aspect of social mobility rather than of social insecurity, and it seems that linguistic insecurity is shaped by social and geographic dialects and education (Baron, 1976). Taking this background into account, this paper investigates an ongoing sound change through the analysis of speaker perceptions via a series of awareness and discrimination tasks and observations of meta-linguistic awareness. The informants analyzed are speakers of the Lleidatà dialect, a Western variety of Catalan. The ongoing sound change studied concerns the productive variability of the ending (i.e. [e ]/ [E ]) in different verb tenses, such as canta ‘she/he sings’ or cantava ‘she/he used to sing’. This ending has been traditionally pronounced [e ]; however, nowadays it is starting to be pronounced [E ]. The analysis of the perception of this phenomenon sheds light on the fact that the prestige of the new vowel [E ] (spread through schooling and local broadcasting) is linked to more linguistically innovative and insecure speakers. Those included in this group are subjects who have both knowledge of written Catalan and a higher sociocultural status.