Vowel Quality and Phonological Projection
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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 Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter App endices Vowel Quality and Rhyme Structure in Dutch Intro duction The Dutchvowel system Tenseness versus Length The Case of Dutch The argument for length The arguments against length A theory based on the feature lax lax and syllable structure in vowel harmony Tenseness and branchingness in Dutch iii CONTENTS iv Formalization in Optimality theory Some more arguments for the length of Avowels Tenseness cannot b e dened in a satisfactory way phonetically Minimality requires branching Avowels form the domain of tonal contour in Lim burg Dutch Conclusion App endix Historical overview Dutch structuralism Pregenerative literature Early generative grammar Bisegmental analyses in generative phonology Tilburg Dutch and Standard DutchVowel Length Details in the Standard Dutchvowel system Diphthongs Ambisyllabicity rlengthening The phonetic nature of the tensing feature Extrasyllabicity and catalexis A dialect with real length Tilburg Dutch The vowel system Why only lax vowels can b e long Vowel shortening Analysis Long vowels in other Brabant dialects The limited distribution of long vowels Conclusion Derivation of the Dutchvowel system Conclusion Derived schwa in Dutch Intro duction Prop erties of rschwa Wordinitial p osition Wordnal p osition Vowel quality Stress Closed syllables Style registers Prop erties of eschwa CONTENTS v The ep enthetic vowel is schwa Eschwa do es not o ccur at the end of the word Eschwa only o ccurs in the last syllable of the word Wordinternal contexts in whicheschwa do es not o ccur Style registers Summary and conclusion Dutch Uschwa Intro duction Prop erties of uschwa Syllable weight Uschwa do es not o ccur wordinitially Some other segmental eects The onset of schwasyllables The co da of schwaheaded syllables Degenerate and sc hwaheaded syllables Obligatory versus optional ep enthesis Again on complex onsets Schwa surrounded by identical consonants Schwa after ng Uschwa and stress Adjacency b etween schwa and full vowels Complementary distribution of uschwa and eschwa Schwadeletion Conclusion Previous analyses of uschwa Reduction Theory Ep enthesis Theory NoSyllable Theory Remaining problems Final Devoicing Sup erheavy syllables b efore schwa Postlexical uschwa Umlaut Conclusion Table of Prop erties SchwainFrench and Norwegian Intro duction French Eschwaistheepenthetic vowel Eschwa do es not o ccur at the end of the word CONTENTS vi Uschwamust o ccur in an op en syllable Laxing in the head of a fo ot Uschwa do es not o ccur at the b eginning of the word Consonant clusters b efore schwa cannot b e p ossible complex onsets Schwa is stressless Schwa cannot o ccur next to a vowel Schwadeletion A parameter Conclusion plus a note on learnability Norwegian Schwa is the ep enthetic vowel Ep enthetic schwadoesnotoccurattheendoftheword Schwamust o ccur in an op en syllable Schwa do es not o ccur at the b eginning of the word Consonant clusters b efore schwa cannot b e p ossible complex onsets Alternation with degenerate syllables Conclusion and another note on learnability Conclusion AVowelGlide Alternation in Rotterdam Dutch Intro duction The second p erson clitic Hiatus Hiatus after high vowels After coronal stops Third p erson singular clitic The diminutivesux Sieverss Law Other issues Clitics and the diminutive in Standard Dutch Lexical forms The underlying form of S is not i High vowel followed byschwa st p erson plural clitic Conclusion The Pro jection ConstraintFamily Intro duction Pro jection and weakness The fo ot level CONTENTS vii N level The Nlevel Nuclear level Features Constraints conicting with pro jection and weakness Conclusion A Constraints and Families of Constraints A Proso dic wellformedness A Syllable wellformedness A Foot wellformedness A Word wellformedness A Autosegmental Representations A Feature Co o ccurrence and Licensing A Parsing A Constraints against unnecessary structure A Ad Ho c Constraint B Arguments for ranking B Top ology of the Dutch lexicon B Top ology of the Dutch p ostlexical phonology C Ranking schemes C Top ology of the Standard Dutch lexicon C Top ology of the Standard Dutch p ostlexical phonology C Top ology of the French phonology C Top ology of the Rotterdam Dutch phonology References Summary in Dutch Summary in English Intro duction The Headedness of Syllables Almost all phonological theories which recognise the syllable as a con stituent also p ostulate that this constituent has a head The notions head and constituent are formalised in dierentways in dierent theories but the underlying intuition seems to b e the same in all formalisms In this thesis I explore some consequences of this headedness hyp othesis whichI think have not suciently b een worked out The criteria for headedness are quite diverse but fortunately they con verge most of the time I will mention the most imp ortant ones here One criterion is sonority As is wellknown universally the syllable consists of a monotonic sonority rise optionally followed by a monotonic sonority fall see Basbll Clements for a few recent discussions Therefore every syllable has exactly one sonority p eak We could call this p eak segment the head Another criterion is prominence Some phonological features like stress or tone seem phonologically not to b e assigned to individual segments but rather to syllables or other proso dic constituents When these features get realized they generally do so on one sp ecic segment Again we could call this segmentthe head of the syllable Clements Hermans a Odden Inversely it has sometimes b een argued that the fact that vowel fea tures can spread skipping consonants in vowel harmony pro cesses whereas owels is an consonantal features seem to never spread over intervening v argument for headedness Kaye Lowenstamm and Vergnaud Van Lit Van der Hulst and Van de Weijer Vowels b eing typical syl lable heads pro ject to a level for instance the nucleus where consonants are no longer visible Whereas there is a level at which these vowels are adjacent to one another there is no similar level for consonants A third criterion is dispensabilityWhenwehave a syllable like tap in a language we can strip o the t andor the p still retaining a complete syllable ta ap a But in most languages we cannot do the same The Headedness of Syllables with the a tp We could call this indisp ensi ble segmentthehead Unfortunately this criterion is not very strong as it stands b ecause it gives undesirable results in the case of diphthongs pai and in languages with syllabic sonorants pan In the rst case b oth a and i would b e assigned the status of head b ecause the language would presumably allow b oth pa and pi syllables in the second case b oth a and n would get the same status b ecause the language would allow b oth pa and pn On the other hand we will see that some syllable heads in some languages can only o ccur in closed syllables Also the onset seems to b e an obligatory sub constituent