Scottish Gaelic displays a phonological contrast that is realised in different dialects by means of tonal accent, glottalisation or overlength. In line with existing analyses of similar oppositions in languages such as Swedish, Danish, Franconian and Estonian, I show that this contrast reflects a difference in metrical structure. Using the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory, I argue that this metrical contrast is derived, and results from faithfulness to foot structure that is built regularly at the stem level, but rendered opaque by subsequent phonological processes. Scottish Gaelic therefore represents an intermediate stage in the diachronic development of underlyingly contrastive metrical structure. This analysis successfully accounts for the complex properties of svarabhakti, a process of copy epenthesis that is intimately connected to the phonological contrast in question, and also sheds light upon the relationship between the oppositions of tonal accent, glottalisation and overlength found in various languages of northern Europe.

The existence of incomplete neutralisation in connection with processes like final devoicing is well-known, but little work exists on typologically more uncommon morphological processes such as Celtic initial mutation. This paper reviews the small existing literature on incomplete neutralisation in initial mutation, showing that no convincing evidence has been found so far, and presents a new nasal airflow study on four speakers of Scottish Gaelic that adds to these negative results. Radical initial /p/ and /m/ in Scottish Gaelic are neutralised to [v] under the lenition mutation. Vowels following radical initial /m/ in Scottish Gaelic may display either categorical phonological nasalisation or gradient phonetic nasalisation. Nasal airflow in items with radical initial /p/ and /m/ is measured in order to determine whether the degree of vowel nasalisation after [v] in lenited forms is sensitive to the identity of the corresponding radical consonant. LME model comparison finds that only categorical phonological nasalisation, and not gradient phonetic nasalisation, may be subject to morphological conditioning. This is at odds with widespread existing findings for processes such as final devoicing, where the gradient phonetic properties of neutralised segments display sensitivity to paradigmatic effects. The absence of incomplete neutralisation in initial mutation is consistent with recent proposals that restrict the types of morphophonological processes that may bring about incomplete neutralisation to highly transparent, phonetically natural processes involving conflict between word-specific morphological pressures and language-wide phonotactic constraints. These findings can inform us about the structure of the mental lexicon and the derivation of morphologically complex forms.

In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jespersen's Cycle stage II -bipartite ne + not -to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong effect of region and time period can be clearly observed, with certain linguistic factors also playing a role. We attribute the early onset of the change to contact with Scandinavian: North Germanic is known to have undergone Jespersen's Cycle earlier in its history, and the geographical distribution of early English stage III fits neatly with the earlier boundaries of the Danelaw.

According to the modular feedforward architecture of grammar, the phonetics is sensitive only to the output of the phonology and is thus blind to morphological or lexical conditioning (Pierrehumbert 2002). However, this prediction is challenged by claims that fine-grained phonetic detail may display paradigm uniformity (PU) effects (Steriade 2000). In the present study I search for phonetic PU effects in vowel nasalisation in Scottish Gaelic by investigating alternating items in which a nasalising environment is removed by a morpho(phono)logical process known as lenition, which replaces initial [m] with [v] under certain morphosyntactic conditions.In vowels following initial [m], a clear distinction is found between (i) categorical phonological nasalisation, which may be subject to lexically conditioned blocking and which displays overapplication in lenited forms, and (ii) gradient phonetic nasalisation, which applies in those items where categorical phonological nasalisation fails to occur and which disappears completely in lenited forms. The differing patterns displayed by these two types of nasalisation fit neatly with the predictions of a modular architecture, in which categorical phonology has direct access to morphological information but gradient phonetics does not, and I conclude that non-modular architectures such as Exemplar Theory are not the correct explanation for putative PU effects.

The vowel system of the dialect of Scottish Gaelic spoken in Ness, Lewis differs from that of other dialects in several important ways. In particular, several vowels display patterns of allophony that have not been investigated instrumentally and, in some cases, have not been reported before for Scottish Gaelic. This paper documents the Ness system in detail, focusing in particular on the tense–lax opposition in /i e/ and retraction of /a(ː)/ next to velarised consonants. The results of a traditional linguistic fieldwork study are presented first, followed by a detailed acoustic study of nine speakers. The acoustic reality of these allophonic patterns, reflected in F1 and F2 values, is verified statistically using LME modelling. Bimodality in the distribution of tokens in acoustic space, confirmed statistically with Hartigan’s Dip Test, is taken as evidence for the existence of discrete phonological categories (Bermúdez-Otero & Trousdale 2011). It is found that speakers vary as to whether these allophonic oppositions are restricted to the phonetic grammar, or have undergone stabilisation and advanced into the categorical phonology (Bermúdez-Otero 2007, 2015). It is observed that laxing of /i e/ in Ness Gaelic occurs in exactly those contexts where there is a direct transition between the vowel and a following supra-glottal consonant. It is therefore proposed that this tense–lax opposition is grounded in conflicting strategies of contrast enhancement, whereby laxing increases the perceptual distinctiveness of a following consonant by allowing for more distinctive formant transitions, at the expense of the distinctiveness of the vowel itself (Storme 2019).