L'alternance des voyelles moyennes en coratin : une analyse basée sur la théorie des éléments

Abstract

Coratino is a dialect spoken in the region of Puglia, in which there is a process of vowel reduction: all unstressed vowels except /a/ are reduced to schwa. However, this reduction does not happen when a vowel is adjacent to a consonant that shares a melody element, such as palatality for front vowels and velarity or labiality for back vowels. In addition, the ATR property of the mid vowels alternates: stressed /ε,ɔ/ are realized as [e,o] in unstressed positions, and /o,ɔ/ surface as [u] only when the adjacent consonant is velar. The analysis of this alternation is based on a version of Element Theory, and also on the licensing constraints that on the one hand define the specific choice a language makes among the combinatory possibilities, and on the other hand play a role in defining the properties of the phonological processes in the language.

Assessing the Representation of Phonological Rules by a Production Study of Non-Words in Coratino

“…All initial vowels appeared as quite stable acoustically, confirming that they are never reduced in Coratino, even in an unstressed configuration. For non-initial unstressed vowels, the acoustic analyses confirmed the phonological reduction process previously described by Bucci (2013Bucci ( , 2017. Indeed, non-initial unstressed protected vowels maintained their vowel quality and just displayed some phonetic reduction with a decrease in formant contrast.…”

“…This supports the phonological analyses of this process as they have been developed in e.g. Bucci (2013Bucci ( , 2017 in the non-linear phonology framework, proposing that consonantal protection provides the target vowels with branching structures in the skeleton. Branching structures would enable the vowel to resist reduction, following the proposal by Honeybone (2005) that segments sharing an articulation feature are protected from lenitions.…”

“…In this case, there is only a partial phonological reduction concerning the contrast between mid-high and mid-low vowels, which is lost. The reduction process has been analyzed in the context of formal phonology in Bucci (2013, 2017) and D'Introno & Weston (2000.…”

Vowel Reduction in Coratino (South Italy): Phonological and Phonetic Perspectives

“…Finally, in the case of unstressed noninitial vowels protected by an adjacent consonant, the branching mechanism, associated to so-called licensing constraints in the framework of "government phonology" Göksel, 1994, 1996;Kaye, 2001), provides shifts of some vowels towards other vowels in the system under the influence of the branching consonant. Bucci (2017) shows that this set of shifts enables to perfectly predict the alternation suffered by mid-vowels, mid-low vowels being realized as their mid-high counterpart (/ɛ/ transformed into /e/ and /ɔ/ into /o/) and the mid back rounded vowels being transformed to /u/ in velar contexts.…”

“…Vowel Reduction in Coratino vowels in an unstressed protected context, if confirmed, would be quite usual, as it has been observed in a number of systems (see section 1.1). A phonological analysis of this process has been proposed by Bucci (2017). However, we will not discuss this in any more detail as the phonetic data are currently inconclusive concerning the reality of this assumed phonological reduction process.…”