Intersyllabic conditions and phonological processes (original) (raw)
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Optimization of syllable contact in Old Spanish via the sporadic sound change metathesis
Probus, 2004
In this article I treat the optimization of syllable contact in Old Spanish, particularly the "bad syllable contact" brought about by pre-or posttonic syncope in Late Spoken Latin or by the concatenation of morphemes. As may be observed from the data below, speakers of Old Spanish made use of many repair strategies -metathesis, dissimilation, palatalization, intrusive stop formation, deletion and strengthening -the effect of which was to improve the transition between syllables. Interestingly, a single etymon may yield multiple variants, each evidencing one of these phenomena, though in Modern Spanish only one of these has survived, either the form that shows metathesis (when morphologically simple), or the fully faithful variant with verb plus clitic forms.
Language, 2000
Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Dr. W.A. Wagenaar, hoogleraar in de faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op donderdag 10 september 1998 te klokke 16.15 uur door Robertus Wilhelmus Nicolaas Goedemans geboren te Haarlem in 1967 1 Rhymes and moras, which will be introduced later, are even smaller prosodic units. Rhymes will be argued later to replace the syllable as the prosodic unit that is the domain in certain phonological processes, and moras do not dominate strings of segments but rather single segments. However, see van Heuven (1994) on the possibility of single segments acting as prosodic domains in general. * Using this kind of structure meant that he could refer to the syllable as a unit, while in the same effort resolving the, at that time still troublesome, ambisyllabicity problem. This problem involves segments that phonologically belong to the two syllables between which they are CHAPTER 1 6 4 The bars over some of the vowels in (4) indicate length. phonotactic co-occurrence restrictions between them that do not hold between the other subsyllabic parts. A notorious example of such a restriction is the impossibility of the sequence "long vowel-velar nasal". Combinations like [o ], [i ] and [a ] are ill-formed in a large number of languages. Another argument for the constituency of nucleus and coda is of a more phonetic nature. A long history of experiments shows that there is a temporal relation between a vowel and a following consonant in a large number of languages (cf. Peterson & Lehiste 1960; Chen 1970). The experiments reveal some sort of "trade-off " relation between the nucleus and the coda, but not between the nucleus and the onset. For instance, long vowels are often followed by short consonants and short vowels by long consonants, and voiced consonants are preceded by longer vowels than voiceless consonants (cf. English bed vs. bet). These observations show that the durations of the nucleus and coda are interrelated. Following Lehiste's (1971) assumption that such temporal relationships between two segments reflect programming as a unit at some higher level, we insert a node called the rhyme under the syllable node (cf. Fudge 1969; Selkirk 1978). This new node dominates the nucleus and the coda, which results in the syllabic structure presented in (3). (3) σ Onset Rhyme Nucleus Coda st a nd Not only does this rhyme unit indicate which group of segments must be identical when we create two rhyming lines of a poem, it is also very useful in many phonological rules. An example of such a rule is provided by Lass (1984). He states that, in Old English noun declensions, the onset-rhyme division is needed to account for the presence of a suffix. Let us look at some of Lass' data. 4 (4) a. Neuter a-stem, nom pl : col-u 'coals' word 'words' lim-u 'limbs' wīf 'women' 1.2.1 Stress: an introduction to the phenomenon Sweet (1902:47) defines force (or stress) by the effort with which breath is expelled from the lungs. He identifies 'loudness' as the acoustic correlate of stress. There is a, perhaps not so obvious, discrepancy between Sweet's definition of stress and his acoustic correlate. The effort with which breath is expelled is definitely speaker oriented, while loudness is a perceptually (read 'for the listener') defined property of speech that is correlated with the intensity of the speech signal. 5 This is probably what Jones (1950) had in mind when he introduced the distinction between stress (speaker activity) and prominence (effect perceived by the listener). 1 The experiments reported on in this chapter have been published in Goedemans & van Heuven (1993).
In: Gunther De Vogelaer, Guido Seiler (ed.), The Dialect Laboratory. Dialects as a testing ground for theories of language change. Studies in Language Companion Series, 128. Amsterdam; Filadèlfia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pàg. 197-226., 2012
This paper has three goals. First, it aims to illustrate how the problems derived from access to intricate diachronic empirical data can sometimes be informed by a careful look at interdialectal microvariation, in that this linguistic microvariation can sometimes help to explain why a phonological process applies or has applied. Second, it intends to show how some of the machineries developed within Optimality Theory to account for synchronic surface resemblances between the members of an inflectional paradigm can be applied to account for phonological change. Third, it attempts to demonstrate how the analysis of phonological change and linguistic variation in a specific linguistic variety and across nearby linguistic varieties can provide noteworthy insights about the architecture of these machineries. Overall, we provide significant empirical evidence, drawn from Catalan, Spanish and Occitan inflection, that analogy is exclusively induced by phonological markedness, that is, for concluding that what determines or governs the direction of the pressure is not a specific morphological status of a word but rather the need to respect phonological markedness.
Edge Effects and the Prosodic Hierarchy: Evidence from Stops and Affricates in Basque
Proceedings of ALNE.../NELS., 1999
Stem-final consonants are often subject to alternations that depend on the following context Typical cases are found in Diola Fogny (1) and French (2). Final consonants appear unchanged in word-fmal position (I, 2a) and before vowel-initial suffixes (lb, 2c), but delete (1) or trigger epenthesis (2b) before consonant-initial suffIXes. (1) (2) Deletion in OiDia Fogny (lUI 1986): a. /na-yoken-yokenl 4 [nayokeyoken] b. /-tey-tey-or! 4 [teteyor] Epenthesis in French: a. /tristl b. /trist-mdl c. /trist-ES/ 4 [trist] 4 [tristremcr] 4 [tristEs] 'he tires' 'disentangle' 'sad' 'sadly' 'sadness' A traditional account of these patterns (e.g. ItO 1986) involves two mechanisms: 1. extraprosodicity or extrametricality, and 2. resyllabiftcation into the onset of the following syllable. Consonants may be licensed by the syllabification rules of the language or by virtue of their extraprosodic status at a word edge. If neither mechanism is available, which may be the case in word-internal preconsonantal contexts, a repair strategy must be adopted, typically deletion or epenthesis. My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I show that edge effects at the word level are only a subcase of edge effects at the end of all prosodic constituents, from the word to the utterance. These edge effects also become stronger as we move up the Prosodic Hierarchy, i.e. the higher the prosodic boundary, the more consonants it licenses. Second, I develop a phonetically-motivated approach to these edge effects, which crucially relies on the perceptual cues to consonants and the phonetic characteristics of edges of prosodic domains. This account is cast in Optimality Theory, specifically in the 'licensing by cue' approach of Steriade (1997). It is characterized by the absence of a syllabic level, which 11banks 10 Ikuska Ansola for being such a good informant, and to Jo~ Ignacio Hualde for insightful co=enls on the data and the relevant literature. Thanks also to
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This paper looks for an interpretation of the phonetic factors causing consonant lenition and elision to occur through an analysis of intervocalic [j] in Majorcan, a dialect of Catalan spoken in the Mediterranean island of Majorca. Articulatory and acoustic data for several Majorcan Catalan speakers still producing the palatal glide in all word positions and segmental environments show that the consonant is lower and more variable in intervocalic position than word initially and word finally. Lowering is enhanced by the presence of contextual low and mid low front vowels, mostly so if stressed and placed immediately after the palatal glide. Inspection of [VjV] formant trajectories suggests that, in spite of undergoing articulatory reduction, [j] is produced with an independent articulatory gesture; moreover, coarticulatory effects between the palatal glide and the following vowel may render the former phonetic segment perceptually indistinguishable from the latter and thus prone to undergo elision. Strongly lenited variants of intervocalic [j] appear to be receding, and conservative speakers show specially low realizations of the palatal glide which may have been widely spread among the speaking population at the time that the intervocalic consonant underwent systematic elision in some areas of Majorca in the past. These findings are in support of the notion that the lenition and subsequent elision of intervocalic consonants are assisted by contextual and prosodic factors.
15 The phonology of Romance contact varieties (together with Christoph Gabriel)
Christoph Gabriel, Randall Gess and Trudel Meisenburg (eds.) Manual of Romance Phonetics and Phonology. Berlin: De Gruyter., 2022
The present chapter provides an overview of segmental and prosodic properties of Romance contact varieties. By using this term, we refer to linguistic systems that are acquired as either a first or an early second language and used by their speakers on a regular basis in their social environment and whose phonological systems are crucially influenced by the phonology of another language. After briefly reviewing selected theoretical approaches to language contact, we select examples to discuss mechanisms and effects of linguistic contact at different phonological levels: starting with segments, we progress to the higher levels of word prosody, stress patterns, and durational cues and end with a discussion of cross-linguistic influence at the intonational level.