Resistance to the syntagmatic influence of the vowel /a/ in Spanish

Abstract

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.