Vowel Prothesis before /r/ revisited: Acoustics and Typology David Bolter, Indiana University, [email protected] It is well-known that the phonological class of rhotic is very difficult to define articulatorally. Wiese (2011), for instance, discusses a wide range of sounds that can be classified as a rhotic. Divided by place of articulation, these include 4 different types of alveolar rhotic, 2 retroflex types and 2-3 uvular types. By manner of articulation they can be divided as follows: 2 types of trills, 2 types of flaps, 1 fricative, 2 types of approximants and 1 lateral flap. Although the phonological class of rhotic is well-motivated, I hold that the various types of rhotics are subject to quite different phonetic pressures and that this influences their phonological patterning. To shed light on this question, I present a case study of a phonological process found in a particular dialect of Swiss German, namely the dialect of the Wallis. As a variety of Swiss German, the dialect of the Wallis has a number of features that are particularly conservative as compared to Modern Standard German. However, one interesting innovation is the process of vowel prothesis found in Walliser German. This is a process whereby the vowel /a/ is epenthesized before /r/ at the beginning of a word provided that it is not preceded by an unstressed vowel. Some representative data are presented here in (1). Note the Standard German forms attest to the fact that this is a vowel epenthesis and not a deletion. (1) Word-initial vowel prothesis (transcriptions as in Wipf 1910:105-107) Standard German Walliser German Gloss Rad [a-rad] ‘wheel’ reif [a-ripf] ‘ripe’ Ruhe [a-reppo] ‘calmness’ Ross [a-ros] ‘horse’ In these examples, there is an /a/ vowel, which has been inserted in word-initial position preceding the consonantal /r/, which is a strongly trilled r. The original source for Walliser German, Wipf (1910:105-106), describes this change in the following way: “In general every initial r, which cannot lean on a preceding unstressed vowel, shows this development” [Translation by author].1 Additionally, the process can be shown to be synchronic, since there are prosodically-conditioned alternations e.g. [dǖ müošt öi aredu] ‘you ALSO have to talk’ vs. [ir miǝst öi redu] ‘you also have to TALK’ (Wipf 1910:106), where the former has sentential stress on the adverb [öi] and the latter has sentential stress on the verb [redu]. This process has received some attention in the literature, for example, in Hall (2011), where the constraint ranking of *ω[R >> ONSET, DEP-V enforces vowel epenthesis. In this paper, I revisit that process of vowel prothesis and discuss vowel prothesis before /r/ in light of the phonetics of such a development as well as the typology of such a change. I argue that vowel prothesis before a rhotic only comes about when that rhotic is a trill. This is because trilled r’s in the world’s languages are known to involve a brief vocalic period (roughly 50ms) prior to the onset of vibration (cf. Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996:219). It is therefore the reinterpretation of this vocalic period as a full vowel that is the engine for this phonological process. This also receives support from the typological literature, since all languages with an attested change of #rV- → #VrV- e.g. Walliser German, Campidanian Sardinian and Basque, have an alveolar trilled /r/.2 In an Optimality Theoretic analysis, I analyze this as due to a high-ranking constraint against trills in the prosodic-word initial position, formulated as *ω[Trill. In this way, my analysis makes the prediction that a monoquantal change (in the sense of Honeybone 2016) of the type #r- → #Vr-, where the rhotic in question is not trilled, should be unattested synchronically and diachronically.

1 Im allgemeinen [sic] zeigt jedes anlautende r, welches sich nicht an einen vorausgehenden unbetonten Vokal anlehnen kann, diese Vokalentwicklung. 2 Armenian can also be seen to have such a change, but the historical and synchronic facts of Armenian are more complicated and thus I will not go into them further here. References

Hall, T. A. (2011). Vowel prothesis in Walliser German. Linguistics 49.5: 945–976.

Honeybone, P. (2016). Are there impossible changes? θ > f but f ≯ θ. Papers in Historical Phonology 1: 316-358. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/pihph.1.2016.1705

Ladefoged, P. & I. Maddieson (1996). The Sounds of the World’s Languages. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Wiese, R. (2011). The Representation of Rhotics. In: Marc van Oostendorp, Colin Ewen Elizabeth Hume and Keren Rice (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to Phonology. Malden, MA & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 711-729.

Wipf, E. (1910). Die Mundart von Visperterminen im Wallis. (Beiträge zur Schweizerdeutschen Grammatik II). Frauenfeld: Huber.