Vowel reduction in European Portuguese and the removal of structure

Abstract

This article applies the proposals for the internal structure of vowels made within Government Phonology (GP) 2.0 (Pöchtrager 2006, 2018) to vowel reduction in European Portuguese. GP 2.0 assumes that openness is a structural property and that reduction consists in removing parts of that structure. This approach not only allows us to model various reduction patterns, but also makes it possible to establish a non-arbitrary link between differences in the extent of reduction and the context where it occurs. As will be shown throughout the text, taking aperture as structural has broader cross-linguistic coverage than existing alternatives.