A Study of Vowel Deletion in English: A Foot-Based Approach

Abstract

This study focuses on the deletion of base-final unstressed vowels when a base word is followed by a set of suffixes in English. The traditional analysis assumes that a schwa is inserted between consonants of the base-final syllable consisting of an obstruent followed by sonorants [r, l, m]. Contrary to this, we argue that the schwa before the [r] is underlying rather than an epenthetic. The schwa in rhythm[ðəm]~rhythmic is epenthetic while it is underlying in winter[tər]~wintry. The difference of the schwa can be observed in the realizations of the following word pairs: rhythm[ðəm]~rhythmize[ðmayz] and winter[tər]~winterize[tərayz]. If the schwa in winterize is epenthetic, there must be a proper reason to justify the presence of the schwa in winterize. Concerning the schwa deletion in wintry, we argue that the unstressed vowel deletes to achieve exhaustive syllable parsing into feet. The preservation of the same schwa in winterize is ascribed to blocking stress-class if the schwa deletes in the output. The realization of the schwa in the base-final syllable is decided by the properties of suffixes that belong to different suffix classes. It indicates that variant sets of suffixes behave differently in the base-final schwa realizations in English. A constraint-based analysis in this study tries to explain these by using two different constraint rankings.