Enregisterment of sung speech: seseo and distinction in Rosalía

Server Benetó, Natàlia

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/118071 Copy

Description

Title

Enregisterment of sung speech: seseo and distinction in Rosalía

Author(s)

Server Benetó, Natàlia

Issue Date

2023-05-19

Keyword(s)

Linguistics

Abstract

Trudgill (1983) observed phonological adaptations of British singers to a generalized American dialect, which he argued responded to the industry's power dynamics. Since then, several studies have explored this issue (Beal 2009; Campos-Astorkiza 2016; Eberhardt & Freeman 2015; Duncan 2017). Very few investigations have looked at this phenomenon within the Spanish-speaking world (Coloma & Colantoni, 2012; Papadopoulos & Martínez Cane, 2021). The present study expands on this by examining a linguistic variable of flamenco singer Rosalía taking on enregisterment theory (Agha 2005), as well as authenticity in music genres (Duncan 2017). In Spanish, the phonemic realization of ⟨c⟩ before ⟨i⟩ and ⟨e⟩ and ⟨z⟩ and ⟨s⟩ before vowel can be of seseo, ceceo or differentiation. In Rosalía’s native variety, she would differentiate, “casa” (house) as /cása/ and “caza” (hunting) as /cáθa/. In other dialects, speakers merge to the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in both cases, known as seseo. Flamenco originated in some parts of Andalusia amongst working-class and Romani people, who did seseo (Fernández de Molina Cortés 2020). This paper argues that linguistic features of these groups became enregistered (Agha 2007) as part of the style of flamenco, which resulted in an expectation of certain linguistic resources, one of which is seseo (Ropero Núñez 2004). This preliminary investigation analyzes Rosalía’s realization of said graphemes by selecting pairs of words in her spoken and sung voice(s). A total of 4 interviews and 4 live performances were selected, which took place in different countries, to account for audience accommodation (Giles & Smith 1979). Acoustic analyses of a total of 39 words (27 spoken, 12 sung) were done using PRAAT to verify these realizations. The results show that Rosalía adapts almost categorically to seseo when singing (92%), while she always differentiates in spoken speech. This contextual variation relates to a generalized stylistic adaptation in music, which shows how linguistic features may be enregistered as part of genre performativity.

Publisher

Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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