19 juny, 2023
Autors:
Silke Hamann & Francesc Torres-Tamarit
Títol:
Merger in Eivissan Catalan: an acoustic analysis of the vowel systems of young native speakersEditorial: Phonetica (De Gruyter)
Data de publicació: 16 juny 2023
Més informacióThe vowel system of Catalan has been the focus of many studies, though work on the varieties spoken on the island of Eivissa (Ibiza) are scarce, with a single mention of the possible merger of the mid back vowels /o, ɔ/ (Torres Torres, Marià. 1983. Aspectes del vocalisme tònic eivissenc. Eivissa 14. 22–23). The present article provides the first acoustic analysis of the vowel inventory of 25 young native speakers of Eivissan Catalan, with a focus on the realisations of stressed /ə, ɛ/, and the back mid vowels /o, ɔ/. We employed Pillai scores (Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren & Katie Drager. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34. 458–484) to compare the possibly merged pairs /ə, ɛ/ and /o, ɔ/ to the fully-contrasting neighbouring pairs /e, ɛ/ and /o, u/. Our results show that all participants had considerable overlap of stressed /ə/ and /ɛ/, and all but one had considerable overlap of the back mid vowels, while the fully contrastive pairs (/e, ɛ/ and /o, u/) showed almost no overlap.
13 abril, 2023
Autors:
Clàudia Pons-Moll, Francesc Torres-Tamarit i Ignasi Mascaró
Títol:
Prosodically-driven morpheme non-realization in the Minorcan Catalan DPEditorial: Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton
Data de publicació: Abril del 2023
Més informació
Text completThis article focuses on a case of prosodically-driven morpheme non-realization found in the Minorcan Catalan DP that has not been documented or accounted for in the previous literature. In this variety of Catalan, kinship restrictive appositive phrases show the realization of the masculine personal article if the following personal name starts with a consonant (es conco en Toni, the-def.art.m uncle the-pers.art.m Toni ‘uncle Toni’), but not if it starts with a vowel (es conco Àngel, the-def.art.m uncle Àngel ‘uncle Àngel’). This asymmetrical pattern is entirely unexpected since a preconsonantal coda is generated in the former cases (cf. es conco en Toni [əs.kòŋ.kun.tɔ́.ni]) and an onsetless syllable and a hiatus are generated in the latter (cf. es conco Àngel [əs.kòŋ.ku.án.ʒəl]). The structures obtained are indeed non-optimizing from a strictly syllabic point of view and stand as a clear case of antimarkedness. We argue that this asymmetric behavior is prosodic in nature, and is mainly driven by the need to keep the left edge of the prosodic word free of clitic material, without challenging basic syllabification constraints active in Catalan. We further justify how the cases under scrutiny shed new light on the typology of alignment constraints referred to the alignment between prosodic and lexical categories, on the nature of morpheme realization constraints, and on the morphosyntax-phonology interface.
27 febrer, 2023
Autors:
Evripidis Tsiakmakis, Joan Borràs-Comes i M.Teresa Espinal
Títol:
On the distribution and interpretation of voice in Greek anticausatives. Frontiers in PsychologyEditorial: Frontiers
Data de publicació: 23 de febrer del 2023
Pàgines: 15 Text completThis paper provides experimental evidence in support of the view that Greek does not have three productive morphological classes of anticausative verbs, but only two: the class of verbs that bear non-active voice morphology and the class of verbs that are morphologically active. Across two experiments, native Greek speakers are found to prefer for each anticausative verb either non-active or active voice morphological marking, in the presence or absence of explicit contextual information. It is also shown experimentally that native speakers prefer an interpretation that involves a specific cause for all anticausatives, especially when the existence of such a cause is favored by the contextual setting. Our empirical findings are consistent with the view that the Voice Phrase that is realized as non-active voice morphology in Greek anticausatives is expletive. From a theoretical perspective, we analyze the expletiveness of this Voice projection as the result of semantic redundancy: the Voice head of Greek anticausatives combines with a v head that encodes a redundant cause meaning component and is, therefore, interpreted merely as introducing an identity function.
26 novembre, 2024
Autors:
Francesc Torres-Tamarit
Títol:
Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal LinguisticsEditorial: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA
Data de publicació: 2024
Més informació
Text completAccording to Loporcaro's (2015) book on Romance length, contrastive vowel length in northern Italo-Romance is metrically-governed and implicationally distributed. CVL in proparoxytones implies CVL in paroxytones, but not the other way around. Likewise, CVL in paroxytones implies CVL in oxytones, but not vice versa. This paper develops a foot-based OT analysis of CVL in northern Italo-Romance that combines layered feet (Martínez-Paricio & Kager 2015) with uneven trochees (Jacobs 2019). The analysis adequately predicts the implicational distribution of CVL and discards unattested patterns.
21 gener, 2025
Autors:
Daniel Recasens & Fernando Sánchez‑Miret
Títol:
An Acoustic Analysis of VowelsEditorial: Languages, MDPI
Data de publicació: 2025
Pàgines: 19 Més informació
Text completThe present study is concerned with some aspects of the production of [ɨ] and [ə] in Romanian, i.e., their position within the vowel space, degree of acoustic variability and acoustic duration. To this end, acoustic data were collected for the Romanian stressed vowels [i e a o u ɨ ə] produced by six speakers in controlled consonantal context conditions and real and nonsense words. The formant frequency data reveal that [ɨ] and [ə] do not overlap along the F1 dimension, which may be ascribed to the need to set in contrast the two central vowels phonologically. Moreover, [ɨ] is clearly more variable in F2, and thus in vowel fronting, than schwa. Regarding segmental duration, [ɨ] is as short as high vowels and shorter than schwa, whose duration is comparable to that of mid vowels. The phonetic characteristics for stressed schwa in Romanian are in contrast with those for the same vowel in other world’s languages, in which it is highly variable and shorter than all or most peripheral vowels. This behaviour may be attributed to the existence of two central vowels, while suggesting that [ə] has a well-defined articulatory target in the Romanian language.
