Length and voicing in Friulian and Milanese

Abstract

This paper claims that phonology should express the relationship between vowel length and obstruent voicing operationally rather than in parallel. The empirical focus in on Friulian and Milanese. The distribution of vowel length in Friulian is predictable from the underlying laryngeal specification of obstruents. Stressed vowels are long before underlyingly voiced word-final obstruents although they devoice. This situation creates opacity. In the light of the interaction between vowel lengthening and final devoicing, this paper argues in favor of Harmonic Serialism, a version of Optimality Theory that combines constraint ranking with serial derivations. I demonstrate that only in Harmonic Serialism does vowel length naturally follow from the independent need to satisfy NoVoicedCoda and FootBinarityµ, instead of assuming that vowel lengthening is the consequence of whether or not obstruents project a mora depending on their laryngeal specification. The facts of Milanese are also considered. Milanese patterns as Friulian except that final devoicing is not categorical. I use Serial Variation (Kimper 2011) to solve the problem of opacity and variation in the realization or not of final devoicing. An alternative approach to Milanese that assumes gradual devoicing is also suggested. This analysis combines Harmonic Serialism and turbid output representations (Goldrick 2001, van Oostendorp 2008, and allows us to express formally the difference between Friulian and Milanese in terms of categorical versus gradual devoicing.

1 Length and weight in Romance

“…Several authors have suggested that Western Lombard, like Friulian, lengthens underlying short vowels (Montreuil 1991;Prieto i Vives 2000;Iosad 2012;Torres-Tamarit 2015;; however, Loporcaro (2015) points out that the absence of length from non-final syllables is a general phonotactic constraint, and therefore alternations such as those in ( 5) and ( 6) are best analyzed with a shortening of underlyingly long vowels (cf. Repetti 1992;Iosad 2016).…”

“…In Friulian, vowels are long in a final syllable before underlyingly voiced obstruents, but not before underlyingly voiceless ones: /lad/ 'gone m.sg ' → [laːt] but /lat/ 'milk' → [lat]. Hualde (1990), Montreuil (2010), andTorres-Tamarit (2015) argue that the lengthening in forms like /lad/ but not in forms like /lat/ is mediated by the fact that voiced, but not voiceless, coda obstruents can become moraic, with final devoicing forcing the reassociation of the mora from the final consonant to the vowel: /lad/ → /la μ d μ / → [la μμ t]. Several authors rely on underlying moraic (or more generally quantity) specifications to derive the patterns.…”

L’amuntegament tonal en castellà, català i friülà en la Teoria de l’Optimitat

“…Des del punt de vista segmental, el friülà presenta un sistema vocàlic tònic que inclou vocals fonològicament bimoraiques o llargues (com a [ˈmiːl] 'mel') i monomoraiques o breus (com a [ˈmil] 'mil') (Finco, 2007;Prieto, 1992;Torres Tamarit, 2015;Vanelli, 1998). Com veurem més endavant, aquesta característica, que no existeix ni en català ni en castellà, comporta conseqüències entonatives molt importants.…”

Contrast preservation in Polish Palatalization

“…In the examples below, obstruent voicing contrast cannot be preserved in the output as such but is transformed into preceding vowel length contrast (see 5ac) and/or vowel height contrast (see 5b). 5Transformations of the voicing contrast a. Intervocalic flapping in American English (Fischer & Hirch 1976) ri [d] c. Vowel lengthening in Friulian (Hualde 1990;Repetti 1992;1994;Torres-Tamarit 2015) la [d] In the examples in (5), forms that contrast in obstruent voicing in the input map onto outputs that differ by preceding vowel length and/or preceding vowel height. Although the relevant obstruents are pronounced the same, the outputs are kept distinct in a different way -through the preceding vowel contrast.…”