scholarly journals Syllable weight, vowel length and focus in Lebanese Arabic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Short Vowel ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Consonant Cluster ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Levantine Arabic ◽  
Lebanese Arabic

Research on a variety of languages has shown that vowel duration is influenced by phonological vowel length as well as syllable structure (e.g., Maddieson, 1997). Further, the phonological concept of a mora has been shown to relate to phonetic measurements of duration (Cohn, 2003; Hubbard, 1993; Port, Dalby, & O'Dell, 1987). In Levantine Arabic, non-final closed syllables that contain a long vowel have been described as partaking in mora-sharing (Broselow, Chen, & Huffman, 1997; Khattab & Al-Tamimi, 2014). The current investigation examines the effect of vowel length and syllable structure on vowel duration, as well as how this interacts with durational effects of prosodic focus. Disyllabic words with initial, stressed syllables that were either open or closed and contained either a long or a short vowel wereexamined when non-focused and in contrastive focus. Contrastive focus was associated with longer words and syllables but not vowels. Short vowels were shorter when in a syllable closed by a singleton but not by a geminate consonant, while long vowels were not shortened before coda singletons. An analysis is proposed whereby long vowels followed by an intervocalic consonant cluster are parsed as open syllables, with the first consonant forming a semisyllable (Kiparsky, 2003), while long vowels followed by geminate consonants partake in mora-sharing (Broselow, Huffman, Chen, & Hsieh, 1995). The results also indicate compensatory shortening for short vowels followed by a singleton coda.

Duration of syllable nuclei in Spanish

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-280
Author(s):  
Alexander C. Aldrich ◽  
Miquel Simonet
Keyword(s):  
Research Question ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Consonant Cluster ◽  
Articulatory Phonology ◽  
Using Data

AbstractIn many languages, vowel duration is modulated by syllable structure — a phenomenon known asvowel compression— so that vowels are shorter in syllables with more segments than in syllables with fewer segments. Most instrumental evidence to date has reported an effect, in many languages, of the presence (and complexity) of a coda, and some studies have also documented effects of the presence (and complexity) of an onset. However, no prior studies on Spanish vowel duration have captured any effects of syllable structure. Using data from nine speakers and controlled speech materials, the present study addresses the following research question: Does syllable structure modulate vowel duration? The findings are as follows: (a) Relative to simplex onsets (those with a singleton consonant), complex onsets (those with a consonant cluster) trigger vowel compression; and (b) neither simplex nor complex codas consistently drive vowel compression — i.e. codas do not systematically affect vowel duration. Together with the facts for other languages, our findings support a view according to which syllable structure — in particular,onsetcomplexity — modulates acoustic vowel duration. The study discusses the theoretical implications of this finding, which are argued to be in line with some of the principles of the Articulatory Phonology framework or, alternatively, suggest that codas should not be considered part of the articulatory syllable.

scholarly journals Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on Vowel Duration in Japanese

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason A. Shaw ◽  
Shigeto Kawahara
Keyword(s):  
Shannon Entropy ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Vowel Quality ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Word Duration ◽  
Communicative Efficiency ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Positive Effect

Research on English and other languages has shown that syllables and words that contain more information tend to be produced with longer duration. This research is evolving into a general thesis that speakers articulate linguistic units with more information more robustly. While this hypothesis seems plausible from the perspective of communicative efficiency, previous support for it has come mainly from English and some other Indo-European languages. Moreover, most previous studies focus on global effects, such as the interaction of word duration and sentential/semantic predictability. The current study is focused at the level of phonotactics, exploring the effects of local predictability on vowel duration in Japanese, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. To examine gradient consonant-vowel phonotactics within a consonant–vowel-mora, consonant-conditioned Surprisal and Shannon Entropy were calculated, and their effects on vowel duration were examined, together with other linguistic factors that are known from previous research to affect vowel duration. Results show significant effects of both Surprisal and Entropy, as well as notable interactions with vowel length and vowel quality. The effect of Entropy is stronger on peripheral vowels than on central vowels. Surprisal has a stronger positive effect on short vowels than on long vowels. We interpret the main patterns and the interactions by conceptualizing Surprisal as an index of motor fluency and Entropy as an index of competition in vowel selection.

scholarly journals Lenisering etter kort vokal: relikt-fenomen eller opphav?

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
Gjert Kristoffersen
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Short Vowel ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Stressed Syllable ◽  
Limited Distribution ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Stage Process

The topic of the paper is a small group of Norwegian dialects where lenition of p, t, k into b, d, g in intervocalic and word-final position is limited to words characterized by a monomoraic, stressed syllable in Old Norse. These dialects are spoken in the easternmost local communities in Agder county, at the eastern margin of the South-Norwegian lenition areas where lenition hit all short oral stops irrespective of preceding vowel length. After the quantity shift had made all stressed vowels bimoraic, with rimes being either VV or VC, the distribution of the lenited plosives are after both long and short vowels (the main area) or after short vowels only (the eastern marginal area). Haslum (2004) argues that the limited distribution in the east ist the result of a reversal after long vowels only. While this cannot be refuted as a possibility, I argue below that it may also be the result of a two-stage process, whereby lenition after a short vowel has spread further than the generalized process.

Old and Middle English Phonology

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donka Minkova
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Voicing Contrast ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Separate Branch ◽  
English System

Old English (OE) is a cover term for a variety of dialects spoken in Britain ca. 5th–11th century. Most of the manuscripts on which the descriptive handbook tradition relies date from the latter part of the period. These late OE manuscripts were produced in Wessex and show a degree of uniformity interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066. Middle English (ME) covers roughly 1050–1500. The early part of the period, ca. pre-1350, is marked by great diversity of scribal practices; it is only in late ME that some degree of orthographic regularity can be observed. The consonantal system of OE differs from the Modern English system. Consonantal length was contrastive, there were no affricates, no voicing contrast for the fricatives [f, θ, s], no phonemic velar nasal [ŋ], and [h-] loss was under way. In the vocalic system, OE shows changes that identify it as a separate branch of Germanic: Proto-Germanic (PrG) ē 1 > OE ǣ/ē, PrG ai > OE ā, PrG au > OE ēa. The non-low short vowels of OE are reconstructed as non-peripheral, differing from the corresponding long vowels both in quality and quantity. The so called “short” diphthongs usually posited for OE suggest a case for which a strict binary taxonomy is inapplicable to the data. The OE long vowels and diphthongs were unstable, producing a number of important mergers including /iː - yː/, /eː - eø/, /ɛː - ɛə/. In addition to shifts in height and frontness, the stressed vowels were subject to a series of quantity adjustments that resulted in increased predictability of vowel length. The changes that jointly contribute to this are homorganic cluster lengthening, ME open syllable lengthening, pre-consonantal and trisyllabic shortening. The final unstressed vowels of ME were gradually lost, resulting in the adoption of <-e># as a diacritic marker for vowel length. Stress-assignment was based on a combination of morphological and prosodic criteria: root-initial stress was obligatory irrespective of syllable weight, while affixal stress was also sensitive to weight. Verse evidence allows the reconstruction of left-prominent compound stress; there is also some early evidence for the formation of clitic groups. Reconstruction of patterns on higher prosodic levels—phrasal and intonational contours—is hampered by lack of testable evidence.

Foot and Syllable Structure in Modern Icelandic

1989 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory K. Iverson ◽  
Courtenay A. Kesterson
Keyword(s):  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Consonant Cluster ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Foot Structure

As is well known, vowel length in Modern Icelandic is in general predictable on the basis of syllable structure such that, in polysyllabic words, stressed vowels in open syllables are long, other vowels are short; in stressed monosyllables, however, vowels are long whether the syllable is open or closed by a single consonant, and short only when the syllable is closed by a consonant cluster. In contrast to the ‘final maximalistic’ strategy of Árnason (1980) and other unlikely syllabification schemes designed to unify these two patterns, we invoke Giegerich's (1985) characterization of foot structure as applied to German and English, according to which stressed monosyllables categorize metrically as disyllabic feet whose rightmost member is null. Thus, CVC structures are metrically /CV.CØ/, with the result that the generalization regarding vowel length in words of all types is simply that stressed vowels in open syllables are long, others short.

The prosodic licensing of coda consonants in early speech: interactions with vowel length

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
KELLY MILES ◽  
IVAN YUEN ◽  
FELICITY COX ◽  
KATHERINE DEMUTH
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Short Vowel ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Australian English ◽  
Open Class ◽  
Lexical Constraints

AbstractEnglish has a word-minimality requirement that all open-class lexical items must contain at least two moras of structure, forming a bimoraic foot (Hayes, 1995).Thus, a word with either a long vowel, or a short vowel and a coda consonant, satisfies this requirement. This raises the question of when and how young children might learn this language-specific constraint, and if they would use coda consonants earlier and more reliably after short vowels compared to long vowels. To evaluate this possibility we conducted an elicited imitation experiment with 15 two-year-old Australian English-speaking children, using both perceptual and acoustic analysis. As predicted, the children produced codas more often when preceded by short vowels. The findings suggest that English-speaking two-year-olds are sensitive to language-specific lexical constraints, and are more likely to use coda consonants when prosodically required.

The historical background of the vowel ṣere in some Hebrew verbal and nominal forms

1994 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Khan
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Arabic Orthography ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Classical Arabic

One of the most important sources for our knowledge of the length of vowels in the Tiberian tradition of Biblical Hebrew is a corpus of manuscripts containing transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic letters. In most of the manuscripts the Arabic transcription employs the orthography of Classical Arabic to represent the sounds of Hebrew. Since Classical Arabic orthography used matres lectionis systematically to mark long vowels we are able to reconstruct the distribution of long and short vowels in Tiberian Hebrew. The transcriptions show us that the main factors determining vowel length were stress and syllable structure.

scholarly journals Excrescent vowels in Lamkang prefix sequences

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-213
Author(s):  
Mary Burke ◽  
Shobhana Chelliah ◽  
Melissa Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Short Duration ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Short Vowel ◽  
Vowel Epenthesis ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Epenthetic Vowel

AbstractLamkang is a Trans-Himalayan language spoken in the Chandel District of Manipur, India by under 10,000 ethnically Naga people. Due to a complex person indexation system in Lamkang clauses, multiple prefixes with the shape C- are attached to a verb stem creating lexemes with the shape CCCCVC. To make such forms pronounceable, speakers insert super-short vowel-like segments between the C- prefixes. Combining acoustic analysis with speakers’ intuitions about syllable structure, we examine the nature of these segments, arguing that an accurate phonetic description of Lamkang vowels must include these super-short vowels, as well as long and short vowels, which are phonemically distinct. We call these super-short vowels excrescent, following the terminology discussed in Hall (2011. Vowel epenthesis. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth V. Hume & Keren Rice (eds.), The blackwell companion to phonology, 1576–1596. Oxford: Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0067: 1584). The excrescent vowel is a type of epenthetic vowel, sometimes also called “intrusive”, and is typified by its short duration and centralized quality distinct from lexical vowels. It is unstressed and has the phonetic effect of helping to transition between consonants. We show that the excrescent vowels in Lamkang have formant structures that barely resemble the characteristic formant profiles of the short and long vowels. While excrescent vowels are not contrastive, they are phonologically relevant because they have just enough sonority to form nuclei of CiVCii syllables where Cii is often ambisyllabic with the following syllable. The Lamkang data show that while any language-specific phonotactic constraints must reference the syllable, what constitutes a syllable must include the possibility of excrescent vowels as nuclei.

Simple metathesis in loanword phonology: the Arabic-Romance language contact

2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (4) ◽  
pp. 1049-1084
Author(s):  
Yvonne Kiegel-Keicher
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Stressed Syllable ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Systematic Process ◽  
Loanword Phonology

AbstractSimple metathesis can be found in numerous Ibero-Romance arabisms compared with their Andalusi Arabic etyma. The analysis of a corpus of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan arabisms illustrates its effects on syllable structure and syllable weight. It can be shown that Arabic-Romance simple metathesis constitutes a motivated structural change that provides for typologically unmarked syllable weight relations within the word. After the resyllabification it entails the involved unstressed syllables no longer excede the stressed syllable in weight. However, it is not an obligatory, systematic process, but merely an optional tendency, which corresponds to the universal tendency expressed by the Weight Law.

Acoustic and Kinematic Correlates of Heterosyllabicity in Different Phonological Contexts

2022 ◽  
pp. 002383092110657
Author(s):  
Chiara Celata ◽  
Chiara Meluzzi ◽  
Chiara Bertini
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Structure Data ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Phonological Contrast ◽  
Consonant Gemination ◽  
Production Dynamics ◽  
Kinematic Properties

We investigate the temporal and kinematic properties of consonant gemination and heterosyllabic clusters as opposed to singletons and tautosyllabic clusters in Italian. The data show that the singleton versus geminate contrast is conveyed by specific kinematic properties in addition to systematic durational differences in both the consonantal and vocalic intervals; by contrast, tautosyllabic and heterosyllabic clusters differ significantly for the duration of the consonantal interval but do not vary systematically with respect to the vocalic interval and cannot be consistently differentiated at the kinematic level. We conclude that systematic variations in acoustic vowel duration and the kinematics of tongue tip gestures represent the phonetic correlates of the segmental phonological contrast between short and long consonants, rather than of syllable structure. Data are only partly consistent with the predictions of both moraic and gesture-based models of the syllable about the effects of syllable structure on speech production dynamics and call for a more gradient view of syllabification.

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