Vowel-length contrasts and phonetic cues to stress: an investigation of their relation

Lunden, Anya; Campbell, Jessica; Hutchens, Mark; Kalivoda, Nick

doi:10.1017/s0952675717000288

Cited by 10 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Kaqchikel makes use of centralisation (‘tense‐lax’) contrasts in its vowel system instead, such as /a e i o u/ versus /ə ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ/, though such contrasts did develop historically from earlier length contrasts (e.g. Bennett, 2019; Campbell, 1977; see also Vogel et al., 2016; Lunden et al., 2017; van Heuven & Turk, 2021 for critical discussion).…”

Section: Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko (Mayan)

Bennett

Harvey

Henderson

et al. 2022

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Uspanteko is an endangered Mayan language spoken by up to 6000 people in the Guatemalan highlands. We provide an overview of the phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko, focussing on phenomena which are common in Mayan languages and/or typologically interesting. These include glottalised consonants (ejectives, implosives, and glottal stop), uvular consonants, vowel length contrasts, syllable structure, stress, and lexical tone. Tone is unusual among Mayan languages, especially in Guatemala, and the phonetic description here complements the small handful of existing descriptions of tone in Uspanteko and within the Mayan family.

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Section: Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko (Mayan)

Bennett

Harvey

Henderson

et al. 2022

Language and Linguist. Compass

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“…This idea has been interpreted as a prediction relating to patterns of production as well as perception. Although an overview of reported correlates of lexical stress in descriptions of 140 languages finds limited crosslinguistic evidence for such a relationship (Lunden et al, 2017), there are individual languages for which phonetic data suggests this may be relevant, for example Hungarian, which has a vowel length contrast and for which duration is not a correlate of lexical stress (Vogel et al, 2016). Other types of language-specific restrictions on the ways suprasegmental cues can be combined have also been found, for example, in the co-occurrence restrictions between tones and vowels in Maastricht Limburgish (Gussenhoven, 2012).…”

Section: A Prominence In Oceanic Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic evidence for right-edge prominence in Nafsan

Billington

Fletcher

Thieberger

et al. 2020

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Oceanic languages are often described as preferring primary stress on penultimate syllables, but detailed surveys show that many different types of prominence patterns have been reported across and within Oceanic language families. In some cases, these interact with segmental and phonotactic factors, such as syllable weight. The range of Oceanic prominence patterns is exemplified across Vanuatu, a linguistically diverse archipelago with over 130 languages. However, both impressionistic and instrumentally-based descriptions of prosodic patterns and their correlates are limited for languages of this region. This paper investigates prominence in Nafsan, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu for which previous observations of prominence differ. Acoustic and durational results for disyllabic and trisyllabic Nafsan words show a clear pattern of higher fundamental frequency values in final syllables, regardless of vowel length, pointing towards a preference for prominence at the right edge of words. Short vowels also show centralisation in penultimate syllables, providing supporting evidence for right-edge prominence and informing the understanding of vowel deletion processes in Nafsan. V

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“…Gordon (1997) argues that, for Estonian, there are limits to which a single phonetic parameter can serve multiple prosodic functions, referring specifically to Estonian consonant onset duration in stressed syllable and domain-initial positions. However, in some of the studies mentioned above, and in an overview of studies of acoustic cues to stress by Lunden, Campbell, Hutchens, and Kalivoda (2017), it is not always the case that a parameter is excluded from being used to cue stress or phrasal prominence because of use elsewhere in the system, and that durational variation attributed to these aspects of prosodic structure can occur without obscuring phonemic contrasts of the same parameter.…”

Section: Prosodic Lengthening Effects In Australian Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodically Conditioned Consonant Duration in Djambarrpuyŋu

2019

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Cross-linguistically, segments typically lengthen because of proximity to prosodic events such as intonational phrase or phonological phrase boundaries, a phrasal accent, or due to lexical stress. Australian Indigenous languages have been claimed to operate somewhat differently in terms of prosodically conditioned consonant lengthening and strengthening. Consonants have been found to lengthen after a vowel bearing a phrasal pitch accent. It is further claimed that this post-tonic position is a position of prosodic strength in Australian languages. In this study, we investigate the effects of proximity to a phrasal pitch accent and prosodic constituent boundaries on the duration of stop and nasal consonants in words of varying lengths in Djambarrpuyŋu, an Australian Indigenous language spoken in northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia. Our results suggest that the post-tonic consonant position does not condition longer consonant duration compared with other word-medial consonants, with one exception: Intervocalic post-tonic consonants in disyllabic words are significantly longer than word-medial consonants elsewhere. Therefore, it appears that polysyllabic shortening has a strong effect on segment duration in these data. Word-initial position did not condition longer consonant duration than word-medial position. Further, initial consonants in higher-level prosodic domains had shorter consonant duration compared with domain-medial word-initial consonants. By contrast, domain-final lengthening was observed in our data, with word-final nasals preceding a pause found to be significantly longer than all other consonants. Taken together, these findings for Djambarrpuyŋu suggest that, unlike other Australian languages, post-tonic lengthening is not a cue to prosodic prominence, whereas prosodic domain-initial and -final duration patterns of consonants are like those that have been observed in other languages of the world.

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Vowel-length contrasts and phonetic cues to stress: an investigation of their relation

Cited by 10 publications

References 21 publications

The phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko (Mayan)

The phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko (Mayan)

Acoustic evidence for right-edge prominence in Nafsan

Prosodically Conditioned Consonant Duration in Djambarrpuyŋu

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