Abstract
This paper gives a detailed description of the consonant system of Campidanese Sardinian and makes methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of lenition. The data are drawn from a corpus of field recordings, including roughly 400 utterances produced by 15 speakers from the Trexenta and Western Campidanese areas. Campidanese has a complex lenition system that interacts with length, voicing, and manner contrasts. We show that the semi-automated lenition analysis presented in this journal by Ennever, Meakins, and Round can be fruitfully extended to our corpus, despite its much more heterogeneous set of materials in a genetically distant language. Intensity measurements from this method do not differ qualitatively from more traditional ones in their ability to detect lenition-fortition patterns, but do differ in interactions with stress. Lenition-fortition patterns reveal at least three levels of prosodic constituent in Campidanese, each of which is associated with medial lenition and initial fortition. Lenition affects all consonants and V-V transitions. It reduces duration, increases intensity, and probabilistically affects qualitative manner and voicing features in obstruents. Mediation analysis using regression modeling suggests that some intensity and most qualitative reflexes of lenition are explained by changes in duration, but not vice versa.
Highlights
Lenition is a pervasive phenomenon in human language
This paper explores consonant lenition in a corpus of field recordings of Campidanese Sardinian, a language with complex lenition patterns that interact with voicing, manner, and length contrasts (Virdis, 1978; Bolognesi, 1998)
Not fricatives Virtually all sources agree that word-initial voiceless stops lenite to voiced fricatives following a vowel in a preceding word, and that word-medial etymological short voiceless stops are realized in the same way (Virdis, 1978; Blasco Ferrer, 1984; Bolognesi, 1998; Cossu, 2013)
Summary
Lenition is a pervasive phenomenon in human language. lenition patterns have been described in hundreds of languages (e.g., Kirchner, 1998; Lavoie, 2001), fundamental questions about the nature of these patterns are still a topic of debate in the phonetic and phonological literature. The result, persisting to some extent to the present day, is extensive geographical variation, with lexical items and pronunciations differing from one village to the ; this can be clearly seen in the dialectological studies of Blasco Ferrer (1984), Contini (1987), and Cossu (2013). Despite this pervasive variation, most specialists agree that Sardinian varieties can be coherently classified into three main dialect groups; Campidanese is the dialect continuum spoken in most of the southern half of the island. Contini and Boë (1972) and Frigeni (2009) discuss the phonetics and phonology of Campidanese sonorants and vowels in great detail, presenting acoustic data on vowel nasalization. Molinu (1998, 2017) gives phonological analyses of alternations and phonotactic patterns, mainly focused on the Logudorese variety and touching on Campidanese
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