Principales rasgos gramaticales del español de Nicaragua

This work offers an in-depth description of the main morphosyntactic features found in present Nicaraguan Spanish, a lesser known Central American variety despite being the subject of one of the pioneering dialectological studies on Spanish (Barreto 1893). With the help of text corpora and sociolinguistic surveys, an updated grammatical overview is provided, which takes into account most categories: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and locutions (coordinators, subordinators, among others), and illustrates with examples taken from both formal and informal settings. By comparing these features with previous grammatical descriptions, this study helps in identifying some common American features ―such as the use of medio as an agreeing adjective instead of an adverb particle― as well as some specific patterns ―such as the prominence of ‑udo/‑uda and ‑oso/‑osa suffixes― in present-day Nicaraguan Spanish, some of which remain to be incorporated in the Academy grammar.

Pronunciation Acquisition of the Inflectional Morpheme –ed in English by Nicaraguan Spanish Speakers

This descriptive non-experimental quantitative study investigated if the pronunciation of the –ed morphemeim proves as the English proficiency level develops. A random sampling design was used to recruit research participants. A target sample of 48 Nicaraguan English as a foreign language students were chosen from an accessible population (N= 91) to participate in this research. The participants’ age ranged from 18 to 24, with a mean age of 21 years. They belonged to three English proficiency levels: high beginners, intermediate, and high intermediate. Findings showed that more advanced English as a Foreign Language learners had a significantly higher pronunciation accuracy on the production of the allomorphs, /t/ and /d/. Their error rate on these two allomorphs was as low as 9% and 8%, respectively. Concerning the /əd, ɪd/ allomorph, no significant differences were found among proficiency levels. These results were interpreted in view of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman, 1977) and the Similarity Differential Rate Hypothesis (Major & Kim, 1996). The trends in the data definitely suggested support for the Similarity Differential Rate Hypothesis which postulates that markedness by itself cannot explain the development of L2 learners as they improve their L2 proficiency level. This study offers implications for the teaching of the three phonological realizations of the -ed past tense inflection.

Formality strategies in Managua, Nicaragua

Nicaraguan Spanish is characterized by the reduction of coda /s/ to glottal frication, elision, and glottal constriction, but the latter variant has never been explored in depth. The present study fills this void by analyzing the word-final, intervocalic /s/ environment in sociolinguistic interviews, reading tasks, and image identification tasks conducted with 36 Nicaraguans with the goal of detailing the social patterning of glottal constriction. I find that glottal constriction patterns like sibilance, a hyperarticulated variant, and a statistical analysis reveals two distinct hyperarticulation strategies in formal tasks based on age and education. Given their differing responses to formality, I propose that more educated and younger speakers with more exposure to prescriptive norms apply sibilance, a global hyperarticulation strategy, to signal their education and power on an international scale, while less educated and older speakers utilize glottal constriction to construct an identity associated with regional articulateness.