Pre-Sonorant Voicing, Laryngeal Realism, and Language Contact
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O-TYPE VOWELS in CORNISH Dr Ken George
GEORGE 2013 2ovowels O-TYPE VOWELS IN CORNISH by Dr Ken George Cornish Language Board 1 A B S T R A C T Evidence from traditional Cornish texts and from place-names is used to trace the development of the two o-type vowels, /o/ and / ɔ/. Recent denials by Williams of the existence of two long o-type vowels are refuted. Further evidence shows a difference between /o/ and / ɔ/ when short, and by inference, when of mid-length. The significance of this for the spelling of the revived language is briefly discussed. 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 /ɔ/ and /o/ In George (1984), I showed that there were two o-type vowels in Middle Cornish (MidC), which will be denoted /o/ and / ɔ/. /o/, from Old Cornish (OldC) /ui/ and /ɔ/ from OldC / ɔ/ were separate phonemes. Support for their separateness, when followed by [s], [z], [ θ] and [ ð] appears in three different historical orthographies, in rhymes and in place-names. (The evidence in other phonetic environments, particularly when followed by nasal and liquid consonants, is weaker, and is reviewed below). My discovery has gained wide acceptance, but has been persistently attacked by Nicholas Williams. In Williams (2006), he devoted a whole chapter (31 pages) to the case of the long stressed vowels, concluding: “Middle Cornish never contained two separate long vowels /o ː/ and / ɔː/. 2. The distinction … between troes ‘foot’ and tros ‘noise’ is unjustified.” In this paper, the evidence for the two o-type vowels is reviewed in detail, and the reasons for Williams’ erroneous conclusion are examined. -
Department of English and American Studies
Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Petra Jureková The Pronunciation of English in Czech, Slovak and Russian Speakers Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: PhDr. Kateřina Tomková, Ph.D. 2015 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………… Author‟s signature 2 I would like to express gratitude to my supervisor, PhDr. Kateřina Tomková, Ph.D., and thank her for her advice, patience, kindness and help. I would also like to thank all the volunteers that participated in the research project. 3 Table of contents List of tables ...................................................................................................................... 5 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 7 1.1. English as an important language for international communication .................. 7 1.2. Acquisition of a foreign language ...................................................................... 8 1.2.1. English as a foreign language ..................................................................... 8 1.2.2. Pronunciation .............................................................................................. 8 1.3. About the thesis .................................................................................................. 9 2. English phonetic system ........................................................................................ -
Vowel Quality and Phonological Projection
i Vowel Quality and Phonological Pro jection Marc van Oostendorp PhD Thesis Tilburg University September Acknowledgements The following p eople have help ed me prepare and write this dissertation John Alderete Elena Anagnostop oulou Sjef Barbiers Outi BatEl Dorothee Beermann Clemens Bennink Adams Bo domo Geert Bo oij Hans Bro ekhuis Norb ert Corver Martine Dhondt Ruud and Henny Dhondt Jo e Emonds Dicky Gilb ers Janet Grijzenhout Carlos Gussenhoven Gert jan Hakkenb erg Marco Haverkort Lars Hellan Ben Hermans Bart Holle brandse Hannekevan Ho of Angeliek van Hout Ro eland van Hout Harry van der Hulst Riny Huybregts Rene Kager HansPeter Kolb Emiel Krah mer David Leblanc Winnie Lechner Klarien van der Linde John Mc Carthy Dominique Nouveau Rolf Noyer Jaap and Hannyvan Oosten dorp Paola Monachesi Krisztina Polgardi Alan Prince Curt Rice Henk van Riemsdijk Iggy Ro ca Sam Rosenthall Grazyna Rowicka Lisa Selkirk Chris Sijtsma Craig Thiersch MiekeTrommelen Rub en van der Vijver Janneke Visser Riet Vos Jero en van de Weijer Wim Zonneveld Iwant to thank them all They have made the past four years for what it was the most interesting and happiest p erio d in mylife until now ii Contents Intro duction The Headedness of Syllables The Headedness Hyp othesis HH Theoretical Background Syllable Structure Feature geometry Sp ecication and Undersp ecicati on Skeletal tier Mo del of the grammar Optimality Theory Data Organisation of the thesis Chapter Chapter -
Using 'North Wind and the Sun' Texts to Sample Phoneme Inventories
Blowing in the wind: Using ‘North Wind and the Sun’ texts to sample phoneme inventories Louise Baird ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The Australian National University [email protected] Nicholas Evans ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The Australian National University [email protected] Simon J. Greenhill ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The Australian National University & Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History [email protected] Language documentation faces a persistent and pervasive problem: How much material is enough to represent a language fully? How much text would we need to sample the full phoneme inventory of a language? In the phonetic/phonemic domain, what proportion of the phoneme inventory can we expect to sample in a text of a given length? Answering these questions in a quantifiable way is tricky, but asking them is necessary. The cumulative col- lection of Illustrative Texts published in the Illustration series in this journal over more than four decades (mostly renditions of the ‘North Wind and the Sun’) gives us an ideal dataset for pursuing these questions. Here we investigate a tractable subset of the above questions, namely: What proportion of a language’s phoneme inventory do these texts enable us to recover, in the minimal sense of having at least one allophone of each phoneme? We find that, even with this low bar, only three languages (Modern Greek, Shipibo and the Treger dialect of Breton) attest all phonemes in these texts. -
Abstract: Crossing Morpheme Boundaries in Dutch
Abstract: Crossing morpheme boundaries in Dutch On the basis of Dutch data, this article argues that many differences between types of affixes which are usually described by arbitrary morphological diacritics in the literature, can be made to follow from the phonological shape of affixes. Two cases are studied in some detail: the difference between prefixes and suffixes, and differences between 'cohering' and 'noncohering' suffixes. Prefixes in many languages of the world behave as prosodically more independent than suffixes with respect to syllabification: the former usually do not integrate with the stem, whereas the latter do. Dutch is an example of a language to which this applies. It is argued that this asymmetry does not have to be stipulated, but can be made to follow from the fact that the phonotactic reason for crossing a morpheme boundary usually involves the creation of an onset, which is on the left-hand side of a vowel and not on its right-hand side, plus some general (symmetric) conditions on the interface between phonology and morphology. The differences between 'cohering' and 'noncohering' suffixes with respect to syllable structure and stress in Dutch is argued to similarly follow from the phonological shape of these affixes. Once we have set up an appropriately sophisticated structure for every affix, there is no need any more to stipulate arbitrary morphological markings: differences in phonological behaviour follow from differences in phonological shape alone, given a sufficiently precise theory of universal constraint and their interactions. Keywords: Dutch phonology, phonology-morphology interface, prosody 1 Crossing Morpheme Boundaries in Dutch 1. Introduction Asymmetries in phonological behaviour between types of affixes are not uncommon in languages of the world.1 For instance, prefixes in a given language may behave quite differently from suffixes. -
Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective Bruce, Gösta
Swedish word accents in sentence perspective Bruce, Gösta 1977 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Bruce, G. (1977). Swedish word accents in sentence perspective. Liber. Total number of authors: 1 General rights Unless other specific re-use rights are stated the following general rights apply: Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Read more about Creative commons licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 TRAVAUX DE L'INSTITUT DE LINGUISTIQUE DE LUND PUBLIEs PAR BERTIL MALMBERG ET KERSTIN RADDING XII , SWEDISH WORD ACCENTS IN SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE BY GÖSTA BRUCE CWK GLEERUP 1977 Unh ~rsltetsbiblioteket LUND TRA VAUX DE L'INSTITUT DE LINGUISTIQUE DE LUND PUBLIEs PAR BERTIL MALMBERG ET KERSTIN HADDING XII SWEDISH WORD ACCENTS IN SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE BY GÖSTA BRUCE CWK GLEERUP 1977 CWK Gleerup is the imprint for the scientific and scholarly publications of LiberLäromedel Lund © Gösta Bruce ISBN 91-40--{)4589-7 Gotab Malmö Sweden 1977 TRA VAUX DE L'INSTITUT DE LINGUISTIQUE DE LUND PUBLIEs P AR BERTIL MALMBERG ET KERSTIN RADDING XII SWEDISH WORD ACCENTS IN SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE AV GÖSTA BRUCE m. -
Grapheme-To-Phoneme Transcription in Hungarian
International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Applications vol. 7, no. 1, 2016, pp. 161–173 Received 08/02/2016, accepted 07/03/2016, final 20/06/2016 ISSN 0976-0962, http://ijcla.bahripublications.com Grapheme-to-Phoneme Transcription in Hungarian ATTILA NOVÁK1 AND BORBÁLA SIKLÓSI2 1 MTA-PPKE Hungarian Language Technology Research Group, Hungary 2 Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary ABSTRACT A crucial component of text-to-speech systems is the one respon- sible for the transcription of the written text to its phonemic rep- resentation. although the complexity of the relation between the written and spoken form of languages varies, most languages have their regular and irregular phonological set of rules. In this paper, we present a system for the phonemic transcription of Hungarian. Beside the implementation of rules describing default letter-to-phoneme correspondences and morphophonological al- ternations, the tool incorporates the knowledge of a Hungarian morphological analyzer in order to be able to detect compound and other morpheme boundaries, and it contains a rich lexicon of entries with irregular pronunciation. It is shown that the system performs well even on texts containing a high number of foreign names. 1 INTRODUCTION In the research reported about in this study, our goal was to imple- ment a system that can automatically transform written Hungarian to its phonemic representation. The original intent of the system This is a pre-print version of the paper, before proper formatting and copyediting by the editorial staff. 162 ATTILA NOVÁK AND BORBÁLA SIKLÓSI was to transcribe a database of Hungarian geographic terms. How- ever, due to certain design decisions, our system proved to perform well also on texts containing a high ratio of foreign names and suf- fixed forms. -
Phonetics and Phonology in Russian Unstressed Vowel Reduction: a Study in Hyperarticulation
Phonetics and Phonology in Russian Unstressed Vowel Reduction: A Study in Hyperarticulation Jonathan Barnes Boston University (Short title: Hyperarticulating Russian Unstressed Vowels) Jonathan Barnes Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures Boston University 621 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 119 Boston, MA 02215 Tel: (617) 353-6222 Fax: (617) 353-4641 [email protected] Abstract: Unstressed vowel reduction figures centrally in recent literature on the phonetics-phonology interface, in part owing to the possibility of a causal relationship between a phonetic process, duration-dependent undershoot, and the phonological neutralizations observed in systems of unstressed vocalism. Of particular interest in this light has been Russian, traditionally described as exhibiting two distinct phonological reduction patterns, differing both in degree and distribution. This study uses hyperarticulation to investigate the relationship between phonetic duration and reduction in Russian, concluding that these two reduction patterns differ not in degree, but in the level of representation at which they apply. These results are shown to have important consequences not just for theories of vowel reduction, but for other problems in the phonetics-phonology interface as well, incomplete neutralization in particular. Introduction Unstressed vowel reduction has been a subject of intense interest in recent debate concerning the nature of the phonetics-phonology interface. This is the case at least in part due to the existence of two seemingly analogous processes bearing this name, one typically called phonetic, and the other phonological. Phonological unstressed vowel reduction is a phenomenon whereby a given language's full vowel inventory can be realized only in lexically stressed syllables, while in unstressed syllables some number of neutralizations of contrast take place, with the result that only a subset of the inventory is realized on the surface. -
A Note on the Phonology and Phonetics of CR, RC, and SC Consonant Clusters in Italian
A note on the phonology and phonetics of CR, RC, and SC consonant clusters in Italian Michael J. Kenstowicz 1. Introduction Previous generative research on Italian phonology starting with Vogel (1982) and Chierchia (1986) has proposed that intervocalic consonant clusters are parsed into contrasting tauto- vs. heterosyllabic categories based on several factors: phonotactic restrictions on word-initial consonant sequences, syllable weight as reflected in the distribution of stress and the length of a preceding tonic vowel, the distribution of prenominal allomorphs of various determiners, and the application of syntactic gemination (radoppiamento sintattico). Based on these criteria, clusters of rising sonority (in particular stop plus liquid) fall into the tautosyllabic category while falling sonority clusters composed of a sonorant plus obstruent are heterosyllabic. Clusters composed of /s/ plus a stop display mixed behavior but generally pattern with the heterosyllabic group. In her 2004 UCLA Ph.D. dissertation, Kristie McCrary investigated corpus-external reflexes of these cluster distinctions with a psycholinguistic test of word division and measurements of the phonetic duration of segments (both consonants and vowels). Her results support some aspects of the traditional phonological analysis but call into question others. In this squib we summarize the literature supporting the traditional distinction among these clusters and then review McCrary’s results. An important finding in McCrary’s study was that stops in VCV and VCRV contexts (R = a liquid) were significantly shorter than stops in VRCV contexts. She observed that these contexts align with the distribution of geminates in Italian and proposed that singleton stops are significantly shorter in the VCV and VCRV contexts in order to enhance their paradigmatic contrast with geminates. -
Russian Voicing Assimilation, Final Devoicing, and the Problem of [V] (Or, the Mouse That Squeaked)*
Russian voicing assimilation, final devoicing, and the problem of [v] (or, The mouse that squeaked)* Jaye Padgett - University of California, Santa Cruz "...the Standard Russian V...occupies an obviously intermediate position between the obstruents and the sonorants." Jakobson (1978) 1. Introduction Like the mouse that roared, the Russian consonant [v] has a status in phonology out of proportion to its size. Besides leaving a trail of special descriptive comments, this segment has played a key role in discussions about abstractness in phonology, about the manner in which long-distance spreading occurs, and about the the larger organization of phonology. This is largely because of the odd behavior of [v] with respect to final devoicing and voicing assimilation in Russian. Russian obstruents devoice word-finally, as in kniga 'book (nom. sg.) vs. knik (gen. pl.), and assimilate to the voicing of a following obstruent, gorodok 'town (nom. sg.)' vs. gorotka (gen. sg.). The role of [v] in this scenario is puzzling: like an obstruent, it devoices word-finally, krovi 'blood (gen. sg.)' vs. krofj (nom. sg.), and undergoes voicing assimilation, lavok 'bench (gen. pl.)' vs. lafka (nom. sg.). But like a sonorant, it does not trigger voicing assimilation: compare dverj 'door' and tverj 'Tver' (a town). As we will see, [v] behaves unusually in other ways as well. Why is Russian [v] special in this way? The best-known answer to this question posits that [v] is underlyingly /w/ and therefore behaves as a sonorant with respect to voicing assimilation (Lightner 1965, Daniels 1972, Coats and Harshenin 1971, Hayes 1984, Kiparsky 1985). -
The Production of Lexical Tone in Croatian
The production of lexical tone in Croatian Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie im Fachbereich Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität zu Frankfurt am Main vorgelegt von Jevgenij Zintchenko Jurlina aus Kiew 2018 (Einreichungsjahr) 2019 (Erscheinungsjahr) 1. Gutacher: Prof. Dr. Henning Reetz 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Sven Grawunder Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 01.11.2018 ABSTRACT Jevgenij Zintchenko Jurlina: The production of lexical tone in Croatian (Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Henning Reetz and Prof. Dr. Sven Grawunder) This dissertation is an investigation of pitch accent, or lexical tone, in standard Croatian. The first chapter presents an in-depth overview of the history of the Croatian language, its relationship to Serbo-Croatian, its dialect groups and pronunciation variants, and general phonology. The second chapter explains the difference between various types of prosodic prominence and describes systems of pitch accent in various languages from different parts of the world: Yucatec Maya, Lithuanian and Limburgian. Following is a detailed account of the history of tone in Serbo-Croatian and Croatian, the specifics of its tonal system, intonational phonology and finally, a review of the most prominent phonetic investigations of tone in that language. The focal point of this dissertation is a production experiment, in which ten native speakers of Croatian from the region of Slavonia were recorded. The material recorded included a diverse selection of monosyllabic, bisyllabic, trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic words, containing all four accents of standard Croatian: short falling, long falling, short rising and long rising. Each target word was spoken in initial, medial and final positions of natural Croatian sentences. -
Anti-Romance Laryngeal Patterns in Italian Phonology
Anti-Romance laryngeal patterns in Italian phonology Bálint Huszthy Babes-Bolyai University [email protected] In the literature of laryngeal phonology all Romance languages are depicted as “voice languges”, exhibiting a binary laryngeal distinction between a voiced lenis and a voiceless fortis set of obstruents (Wetzels and Mascaró 2001; Petrova et al. 2006; etc.). Voice languages are characterised by regressive voice assimilation (RVA) due to the phonological activity of [voice] (Petrova et al. 2006; Cyran 2014). Italian manifests a process similar to RVA, called preconsonantal s-voicing; that is, /s/ becomes voiced before voiced consonantal segments; e.g., sparo [sp] ‘gunshot’ vs. sbarra [zb] ‘barrier’, sveglia [zv] ‘alarm clock’, smettere [zm] ‘to stop’, slitta [zl] ‘sled’, etc. (Nespor 1993; Bertinetto 2004; Krämer 2009). Since /sC/ is the only obstruent cluster in Italian phonotactics, Italian seems to fulfil the requirements for being a prototypical voice language. However, this paper argues that s-voicing is not an instance of RVA, at least from a synchronic phonological point of view. Data: This study is built on a loanword test: 15 Italian informants (from different dialectal zones) were recorded in a soundproof studio, who repeated five times 18 Italian sample texts containing 108 target loanwords (e.g., vo/dk/a, foo/tb/all, a/fɡ/ano, iceberg /sb/ etc.). The overall statistics reveal that the informants retain the underlying voice values in the respective obstruent clusters in 65% of the cases; that is, they avoid RVA in a two-thirds majority, which characterises the performance of all the informants rather evenly. Uniformity in voicing also occurs in the data: 20% out of the marked clusters is devoiced (e.g.