Els efectes del context fonètic en el procés d'asil·labació de l'article lo/los en català

Algherese Catalan preserves the masculine definite articles lo/los. According to the
available literature, these determiners generally lose their vowel when they are immediately
preceded by a word ending in a vowel. However, there are no empirical studies with
quantitative data available on the subject. The main goal of our paper is to investigate, by
means of an auditory impressionistic analysis of spontaneous and semi-spontaneous Algherese
speech, which phonetic contexts trigger resyllabification of lo/los with deletion
of the vowel. Our results show that the presence of a vowel preceding these articles is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition to trigger vowel loss. Furthermore, contrary to
the available literature, vowel loss in the context V+lo/los cannot be considered a general
rule, since it only affects one article out of three. Our results indicate that there are specific
phonetic contexts immediately following the articles that can block vowel loss.