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Abstracts Booklet The Nineteenth Manchester Phonology Meeting 19 f«Èn•l«dZi ABSTRACTS BOOKLET Thursday 19th - Saturday 21st May 2011 Held at Hulme Hall, Manchester Organised by a collaboration of phonologists at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester, and elsewhere. This booklet contains the abstracts for all the papers presented at the nineteenth Manchester Phonology Meeting, held at Hulme Hall, Manchester, in May 2011. The abstracts are arranged in alphabetical order by the surname of the (first named) presenter. Unfortunately, one presenter did not submit the non-anonymous version of their abstract in time for inclusion in this booklet; otherwise all abstracts should be here. The abstracts for the oral paper sessions are presented first, followed by the abstracts for the poster paper sessions, and the booklet concludes with abstracts for the special session. All sessions for papers listed in this booklet will take place in either the Old Dining Hall, the JCR or the dining hall area in Hulme Hall. The opening and closing addresses and the special session will be held in the Old Dining Hall. The final programme, included in your registration pack and available on the 19mfm website, gives the details of which papers are in which room, and at which times. Oral papers Pretonic unstressed syllables in English Katalin Balogné Bérces PPCU, Piliscsaba, Hungary [email protected] The paper aims to contribute to the study of phonological strength. It is well-known that certain positions (e.g., stressed vowels, word-initial or post-coda consonants) are stronger, that is, more resistant to lenition (weakening, incl. all types of reduction and deletion) than others (e.g., unstressed vowels, word-final or coda consonants) both synchronically and diachronically. As a typical representative of the Germanic pattern, English exhibits a stress- sensitive system in its consonants, i.e., there is a difference between their pre-stress and post- stress behaviour. In particular, consonants immediately preceding full vowels are strong (note the aspirate in atomic and vehicular) but weak otherwise (cf. atom and vehicle). This extends to vowels, as only schwas are subject to deletion (syncope – battery vs. batt'ry). The present paper investigates the strength of pretonic unstressed syllables. First, word-initially their consonant differs from their vowel: in words of the potato type, the consonant of the first syllable is strong while the vowel is weak, even deletable. Therefore, the evaluation of the strength of that syllable as a whole is ambivalent. We take this observation as argument for abandoning the syllable as a theoretical tool in the discussion of phonological strength and as evidence for the need to treat the consonant and the vowel separately, as is done in CVCV phonology (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004). Second, pretonic unstressed syllables do not exhibit the same degree of phonological strength/weakness in different positions: word-initially their consonants are generally stronger (as in potato, with almost as much aspiration on the /p/ as on the first /t/) than medially (as in Winnepesaukee), while the reverse is true for their vowels (the schwa being more prone to syncopate in potato/suppose than in nationalize). From this, the paper concludes that foot- based adjunction analyses, propagated in Jensen (2000), Davis (2003), etc. are inadequate either because they predict the same amount of aspiration in Winnepesaukee as in potato, or because they allow for a reduced vowel in a monosyllabic foot. Therefore, in the present paper the claim is made that (i) the phonological strength of consonants and vowels should be evaluated separately, a consequence of which is that (ii) stress is a property of vowels (rather than syllables) which may percolate to neighbouring consonants, and that (iii) prominence relations can be reduced to a system of V-to-V and V- to-C interactions. It follows, then, that a theoretical framework based on Ségéral and Scheer's (1999) and Dienes and Szigetvári's (1999) definitions of government and licensing as two antagonistic lateral forces (cf. Scheer 2004, Scheer and Ziková 2010) is a suitable model. With a CVCV skeleton, it is capable of expressing the relative weakness/strength of vocalic and consonantal positions separately. This way, it accounts for the above observations avoiding the debatable notion of the syllable and without making reference to foot structure. Voicing contrast in Hungarian fricatives Zsuzsanna Bárkányi Katalin Mády HAS, Reaserch Institute for Linguistics Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, and ELTE, University of Budapest University of Munich bzsu at nytud dot hu mady at phonetik dot uni-muenchen dot de This presentation aims to explore voicing contrast in Hungarian fricatives especially in word- and utterance-final position. Hungarian is not a final-devoicing language, i.e. there are minimal pairs which differ in the voicing quality of the word-final obstruent: mé[z] 'honey' - mé[s] 'lime'. According to the literature this contrast is cued by phonetic voicing. Recent studies (Kiss-Bárkányi 2006, Bárkányi-Kiss 2010) on the double-faced phonological behavior of [v] in Hungarian show that v in utterance-final position is devoiced due to the aerodynamic conflict involved in the realization of voiced fricatives (e.g. Stevens 1998, Johnson 2003, Jansen 2004, Fuchs-Brunner 2005). Based on this we hypothesize that the other voiced fricatives [z] and [ʒ] are also devoiced in final position. The following questions arise: Is there contrast preservation between voiced and voiceless fricatives in this position? If so, which phonetic parameters might encode the difference when phonation is lacking? Even if there are measurable differences between the voiced- voiceless contexts are they robust enough to be perceived by speakers? How much voicing is needed for a fricative to be perceived as voiced? We realized acoustic and perception experiments in order to answer these questions. In Experiments 1 and 2 we examined (with 6 native speakers of Hungarian) the acoustic realization of /s/-/z/ and /ʃ/-/ʒ/, respectively, in utterance-final position. Our results confirm that voiced sibilants are highly unphonated - over 70% in the fricative interval. However, even compeletely unphonated voiced and voiceless sibilants are reliably disinguished by the length of the fricative and the length of the preceding vowel (and their ratio) - in accordance with the literature on the issue (e.g. Wells 2000). (There are other parameters like intensity of the fircative, preaspiration of the preceding vowel, which we did not measure in this study, but seem to contribute to partial contrast preservation. We also observed that there is considerable inter-speaker variation, but the same speaker usually realizes the voiced-voiceless pairs with different phonation.) An important finding is that when our test words appeared in sentence-medial position we did not find any differences in the length of the preceding vowel. This means that in a phonetically impoverished context, when phonation is lost, a "secondary" cue is enhanced to prevent neutralization. So phonetic features that have been thought to be redundant in the phonology of Hungarian are actually crucial for maintaining the voicing contrast in phonetically unfavorable position. Experiment 3 aims to find out whether speakers really perceive voiced fricatives as such in final position. Unphonated stimuli (over 90% of devoicing in both the phonologically voiced and phonologically voiceless case) were chosen from the acoustic studies. Data was presented as a forced choice test to 20 native speakers of Hungarian through stereo headphones with the help of Praat's ExperimentMFC. Our preliminary results show that if the whole final syllable is presented, both voiced voiceless fricatives are recognized correctly most of the time although with voiced fricatives performing significantly worse. When a lone consonant is presented, voiceless fricatives are recognized correctly, while voiced fricatives are recognized in less than 50% of the cases. They are perceived voiceless. This corroborates that the role of the preceding vowel is crucial in this impoverished position and shows that there is only partial contrast preservation. In Experiment 4 stimuli were chosen from Experiment 1 with different degrees of phonation from 0-100% of voicing in 10% steps and were presented as in Experiment 3. Our results so far show that recognition considerably improves if around 30% of the fricative is realized with phonation. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find a statistically significant difference in the voicing of compact and diffuse voiced fricatives in final position. This entails a further question: can we really explain the phonological behaviour of /v/ by its phonetic properties? We will show that while the articulatory target of /v/ is a labiodental narrow approximant (as Bárkányi-Kiss 2010 based on Padgett 2002) claim, the articulatory target of [z] and [ʒ] is an alveolar and post-alveolar voiced fricative, respectively, and this has phonological consequences. Prosodic faithfulness: evidence from poetic meter Lev Blumenfeld, Carleton University 〈[email protected]〉 In this talk I use evidence of prosodic similarity in poetic meter to propose a general correspondence theory for prosodic structure. The notion of contrast in Optimality Theory is connected with correspondence: faithfulness constraints only refer to those aspects of representation which can be used
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