73 S-Aspiration and Occlusives in Andalusian Spanish: Phonetics or Phonology? Paul O’Neill Oxford Research Centre for Romance Linguistics, University of Oxford School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies, University of Liverpool Abstract This paper examines the pronunciation of the underlying sibilant in the word internal sequences Vowel + Sibilant + Voiceless Occlusive + Vowel (e.g pasta ‘pasta’) in the Spanish spoken in Seville. In this position the sibilant can not only be pronounced as some type of aspiration e.g [pa  t ha] but also there is an alternative pronunciation in which no aspiration occurs and the following occlusive consonant is heavily post- aspirated, e.g [pata]. I hypothesize that this latter pronunciation cannot be derived from the former via an interplay of timing of gestures of a purely phonetic nature but rather corresponds to an underlying aspirated occlusive phoneme. On the basis of this hypothesis I form a number of predictions regarding the phonetic nature of these sequences and via statistical methods come to the conclusion that the Spanish of Seville possesses a set of aspirated occlusive phonemes. Keywords Andalusian Spanish, Acoustic Phonetics, Phoneme Inventory 1.0 Introduction Traditionally, it is considered that in Andalusian Spanish /s/ in coda position undergoes a phonological process whereby it loses its oral features and is pronounced as a voiceless glottal fricative [h] (Goldsmith 1981). This is illustrated in Table 1 with respect to Castilian, the prestige form of the language in Spain.