A voltas coas contraccións: 'cun' e 'con un'

Abstract

Current rules prescribe two spellings, cun and con un, for the sequence con + un, their distribution being determined, if our interpretation is correct, by whether un is followed by a substantive (i.e. in Det function, use cun) or not (i.e. when functioning as a N in a NP, use con un), regardless of the part of speech of un (i.e. whether it is an article, a numeral, an “indefinite”, or a constituent of some other unit). This rule, which was absent from the Normas of 1982, was introduced in the 1995 revision and maintained in the 2003 edition. Here we look at the sense in which contraction is used, in the context of our grammatical terminology, with respect to the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. We establish what counts as a contraction and notice that there may be “contracted” pronunciations not reflected by spelling. Thus, although the Normas don’t make it explicit, the spelling con un does not imply of necessity [ko???], but may also correspond to [ku?]. An examination of the TILG and CORGA databases together with a substantial corpus of transcribed spoken texts leads to the conclusion that the prescriptive rule is justifiable, since phonological contraction is absent chiefly when un is a N. Now precisely in this syntactic context native speakers also habitually make contractions in pronunciation, particularly when un, as N, is followed by the prep. de + a phrase. In such contexts it is natural for the pronunciation [ku?] to correspond to othe standard spelling.