Manuscript in press at Lingusistic Vanguard, April 2020 The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from ten languages Frank Seifart (corresponding author) Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany Dynamique Du Langage (CNRS & Université de Lyon), Lyon, France University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
[email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9909-2088 Jan Strunk University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8546-1778 Swintha Danielsen CIHA, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia Iren Hartmann Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany Brigitte Pakendorf Dynamique Du Langage (CNRS & Université de Lyon), Lyon, France Søren Wichmann Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia Beijing Language University, Bejing, People’s Republic of China Alena Witzlack-Makarevich Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0138-4635 Nikolaus P. Himmelmann University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4385-8395s Balthasar Bickel University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Abstract Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, as previous studies on individual languages have shown. This paper provides a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of relative durations of final and penultimate words in utterances in terms of the degree to which such words are lengthened. The study uses time- 1 Manuscript in press at Lingusistic Vanguard, April 2020 aligned corpora from ten genealogically, areally, and culturally diverse languages, including eight small, underresourced, and mostly endangered languages, as well as English and Dutch. Clear effects of lengthening words at the end of utterances are found in all ten languages, but the degrees of lengthening vary.