Cedergren 1973 /s/ deletion sociolinguistic dataset

We're using some data from Henrietta Cedergren's 1973 study of final /s/ deletion in Panamanian Spanish (via Greg Guy and Scott Kiesling). Cedergren had noticed that speakers in Panama City, like in many dialects of Spanish, variably deleted the /s/ at the end of words. She undertook a study to find out if there was a change in progress: if final /s/ was systematically dropping out of Panamanian Spanish. She also was interested in the effects of both linguistic and social constraints on final /s/ deletion.

Cedergren recorded 8,846 tokens of words whose standard Spanish variant has final /s/. For each token she recorded four properties of the utterance:

Deletion: whether there was a pronounced final /s/ on the word
- 1=deletion
- 0=non-deletion
Part of speech: the grammatical category of the word
- m=monomorpheme (e.g., menos)
- v=verb (second singular inflection, e.g., tienes)
- d=nominal plural marker in a determiner (e.g., los, las)
- a=nominal plural marker in an adjective (e.g., buenos)
- n=nominal plural marker in a noun (e.g., amigos)
Environment: the phonetic environment immediately following the word
- C=consonant
- V=vowel
- P=pause
Class: the "social class" of the utterer
- 1=highest
- 2=second highest
- 3=second lowest
- 4=lowest

Cedegren was careful to collect tokens for each possible combination of

[Part of speech] x [following environment] x [social class]

A typical token might look like this:

1 m C 1

which would mean "a deleted /s/ in a monomorphemic word immediately followed by a consonant, uttered by a speaker of the highest social class."