Volume 07, Winter 1982

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Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 7, Winter 1982
(University of Calgary, 1982-01) Jehn, Richard Douglas; Rowsell, Lorna
Owing to serious organizational difficulties combined with the heavy workloads of those involved with publication, this seventh issue of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics belatedly appears in February 1982. As in the past, we ask that our readers treat these articles as working papers; their appearance here does not preclude their publication in a different form elsewhere.
Open Access
Resistance to the syntagmatic influence of the vowel /a/ in Spanish
(University of Calgary, 1982-01) Anderson, James M
The relative intractability of the vowel /a/ to syntagmatic influence in Popular Latin and early Hispano-Romance seems to support the contention that this sound is unmarked and the most natural of the vocalic phonemes, a consideration also supported by language acquisition studies where /a/ is found to be the earliest vowel in the linguistic formation of children and by typological studies of vowel systems which indicate that /a/ is present in most, if not all, languages. In both stressed and unstressed environments, phonological processes that affected other vowels in the early history of the Spanish language appear to have been constrained when /a/ was involved.