The Phonetics and Phonology of a Disyllabic Foot in Soikkola Ingrian

Abstract

This paper examines the durational characteristics of vowels and consonants in contemporary Soikkola Ingrian, discusses the phonological interpretation of durational contrasts, and studies correlations between the duration of different segments in the foot. The object of the study is limited to disyllabic feet with an open second syllable. The acoustic study shows three durational types of vowels both in the first and second syllable, but only two contrastive types, short and long vowels, are distinguished on the phonological level. Intervocalic consonants have five durational types on the phonetic level, and three contrastive types on the phonological level: single consonants vs. short geminates vs. full geminates. The analysis shows that contemporary Ingrian is undergoing a gradual change from a northern to a southern type Finnic language: the quantity opposition of short and long vowels in non-initial syllables is on the way to be replaced by the quality opposition of reduced and full vowels.

Estonian word prosody on the Procrustean bed of morae

“…However, strong reduction characteristic of at least the modern state of the dialect leads to typological changes in the durational contrast of non-initial vowels. An original short vs. long vowel contrast turns into a reduced vs. short vowel contrast (Kuznecova 2009, Markus 2011, Kuznetsova 2016).…”

Three-way opposition of consonant quantity in Finnic and Saamic languages

“…Despite differences in the duration of the segments, both datasets are displaying similar patterns, and in further analysis we have combined the data from all 6 speakers. The Ingrian data were recorded in 2010 from 2 female speakers of Soikkola Ingrian born in 1927 and 1932 (for details see Markus, 2011). The test words with intervocalic stops (k, t, or p) were placed in carrier phrases in phrase-final and sentence-final positions (e.g.…”

“…('send', inf). In the VCV foot (tapa 'kill', imp.2sg) the second vowel can be interpreted both as short and long, because there is no contrastive structure in Ingrian that would provide a context for a phonological opposition (see Markus, 2011: 109-110 for a detailed discussion). This foot type is similar to the same structures in Estonian and Livonian where the vowel duration is not phonologically contrastive in unstressed syllables at all.…”