Abstract
A growing body of research suggests that vowels vary in degree of strength. These strength differences are borne out in the degree to which these segments undergo or trigger phonological processes such as stress assignment or harmony. Traditionally, this variability has been accounted for through binary differences in phonological representations, such as presence or absence of a segment in the underlying representation, presence or absence of a phonological feature, and moraicity or non-moraicity of the relevant segment. While distinctions in underlying status and moraic structure are an effective tool for capturing some of the observed differences in vowel strength, they do not capture all attested differences. In this paper, we offer evidence supporting a four-point strength scale to which faithfulness and markedness constraints can refer. This model allows for strength differences among underlying and inserted vowels, and within monomoraic and bimoraic vowels as well, subject to scalar implications. We argue that Q-Theoretic representations offer the necessary representational tool to capture the full range of vowel strength.
Highlights
A growing body of research suggests that vowels vary in degree of strength
Strength differences are attributed to underlying vs. epenthetic status; sometimes they are attributed to moraic weight
In subsection 2.1, we explore in more detail the ability of the strength scale in (1) to capture strength differences among what are traditionally described as “short” vowels
Summary
A growing body of research suggests that vowels vary in degree of strength These strength differences are borne out in the degree to which these segments undergo or trigger phonological processes such as stress assignment or harmony. In many languages, inserted vowels act invisible to stress assignment, often resulting in noncanonical stress patterns in an otherwise regular metrical system (Alderete 1999, Elfner 2016) This observation has given rise to grammatical constraints such as HEAD-DEP (Alderete 1999), which penalizes stress assignment to a segment that is absent from the input; or NON-FOOT(ə), which penalizes the assignment of metrical structure to a schwa vowel (Cohn & McCarthy 1998). Building on Schwarz et al (2019), we argue that Q-Theoretic representations offer the necessary representational tool to capture this vowel strength scale as it is manifested in stress assignment and epenthesis patterns.
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