Final Vowel Research Articles

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TEMPORAL PROSODIC PARAMETERS IN THE SPEECH OF FOREIGN STUDENTS LEARNING THE BULGARIAN LANGUAGE

The work examines the prosodic realization of the Bulgarian word stress in the speech of Chinese Mandarin speakers, with the aim of outlining the parameters that make the comprehensibility of their speech difficult. Instrumental phonetics methods are used and recordings of read speech are analyzed with the speech signal processing program Praat. The research is focused on the duration of the vowels as one of the acoustic ques of the word stress. To minimize the "inconsistency" of the binary division of stressed and unstressed units in connected speech (discussed in the literature), taking into account the fact that the acoustic keys of stress are subject to intonational shaping by tonal accents and boundary tones, we separately compare the duration of stressed vowels, the unstressed non-final and the unstressed final. The results show that the characteristic ratio of stressed and unstressed non-final vowels for Bulgarian language, in which the former outweigh the latter by about one and a half times, is not reached among Chinese speakers. Therefore, it is difficult to determine which vowel/syllable is stressed in their speech. The unstressed final vowels are longer than the stressed ones in both groups, which is an expected result due to the final lengthening before pause.

How do penguins differ from kangaroos? Pluralization of vowel-final loan nouns in Hebrew

The study examines variation in the pluralization of Hebrew loan nouns that end with a vowel. Most loan nouns take the plural suffix - im with no variation, while loan nouns that end with vowels other than a show variation with respect to deleting and not deleting the final vowel. Hebrew native nouns that end with vowels other than a are relatively rare and therefore the Hebrew morphological mechanism is not accustomed to pluralizing them. The paper proposes a hierarchy that predicts which vowels are more or less likely to be deleted. It is based on the accessibility of deletion in existing pluralization paradigms within native words, in addition to the interaction of markedness and faithfulness constraints. The study provides further support for the claim that the mechanism of word formation takes into account not only the word itself but also its relations to other words in a paradigm. In addition, it sheds light on morphological adaptation of loanwords and provides predictions with respect to their degree of integration.

Analisis Morfofonemik Dialek Lamalera

This research is entitled "Morphophonemic Analysis of Lamalera Dialect". This title was taken as research because the Lmalera dialect is the Lamaholot language and has its own identity in the form of vowel lengthening in the previous syllable. This morphophonemic work is determined on the influence of morphemes and phonemes as well as grammatical influence. The formulation of the problem in this study is how Lamalera morphophonemic which includes morpheme and phoneme effects and grammatical effects of Lamalera dialect. The purpose of this study is to find out the morphophonemic process of Lamalera dialect in the form of morpheme and phoneme effects and grammatical effects of Lamalera dialect. The method in this research uses the listening method and the chap method, while the data analysis technique in this research is descriptive. The reason the researcher uses this technique is a way used by researchers to process data which will then be descriptive in detail the results of observations of the data that has been collected. The conclusion of this study states that, nouns ending in the vowel /a/ will change to the nasal vowel /a^/ in the form of the second person singular owner. Lamalera dialect has a joint where -an changes into /a^/, there is also a morphophonemical change which is the lengthening of the vowel in the previous syllable. When due to other grammatical elements that follow the vowel changes /e^/ and /o/, the vowel changes /e^/ and /o/ in nouns. If the vowel /e"/ is preceded by another vowel, the morphophonemic changes will follow the pattern below: the final vowel /e"/ preceded by the vowel /a/ only takes a morphophonemic change to /i/.

ВАРЬИРОВАНИЕ ГЛАСНЫХ В ПАДЕЖНЫХ СУФФИКСАХ ЛИЧНЫХ МЕСТОИМЕНИЙ УДМУРТСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

The article discusses phonetic variants of the accusative, ablative, dative, instrumental personal pronouns’ case suffixes in dialects of the Udmurt language, which have different vocal vocalization (-e- ~ -y- / -i-). Variable suffixes in the ablative allow all personal pronouns, in the instrumental – 1pl and 2pl and 3ps, in the accusative and dative – 1pl and 2pl. Allomorphs can be used both in different dialects and within the dialect of the same village. The dative suffixes of 1 and 2 persons -y- ~ -e- are used only in the system of pronominal declension and historically go back to the final vowel of the pronominal basis of the singular number. The remaining case markers are present in the system of substantive and pronominative declension. Morphemes with -i-vocalization are secondary and are formed from -y-morphemes. However, it is not possible to explain the transition by positional changes. The roots of morphological transformations probably go back to the Proto-Permian and Proto-Udmurt periods. Morphemes on -e- are reflexes of the broad final vowel of the basis of personal pronouns 1sg, 2sg, subsequently -e-suffixes participated in the formation of personal pronouns 1pl, 2pl. The case indicators for -y- have a clear similarity to the suffixes of the substantive declension. The borrowing of this variant of morphemes into the system of personal pronouns was due to the pronominal semantics, which is close to the meaning of integral belonging. The material for the study was word forms selected from published dialect texts, articles, monographs, unpublished PhD dissertations, which are devoted to the description of various Udmurt dialects.

Floating Tone in Èsùkù

This paper examines floating tone in Èsùkù - one of the dialects of Akpes spoken in Àjọwá community in Àkókó North West local Government area of Òndó State. Scholars have shown that, floating tone performs functions such as: completed action, negation, agreement, genitive marker, etc. In this paper, it is establish that, a floating tone acts as genitive marker in a noun-noun construction and show completed action in a declarative sentence. Findings in this study show that, apart from /ɔní-/ which serves as genitive marker in the speech form, Èsùkù also has a floating high tone [́] as genitive marker in a noun-noun construction. It is observe that, a floating high tone aligns with the final vowel of the first noun (N1) to form a contour which later simplifies to a level high tone. It is observe the elision of V2 in V1#V2 environment in a genitive construction. The theoretical model employed in analyzing the data in this work is the Autosegmental Phonology because of its problem-solving efficiency in the areas of tone, vowel harmony, and nasality. Descriptive research methodology was adopted for this paper. In eliciting data, the researcher visit the community that speaks the speech form under focus. The study contributes to knowledge in the area of tone analysis in Esuku because no work exists in that area.

Main Factors Conditioning the Absence of the Final ր and the Origin of the Final ի of the Imperative Singular in Armenian Dialects

The 2 sg. Imperative, which was formed in several ways in Old Armenian, has displayed a general tendency toward uniformity in the course of the further development of the Armenian language. In this respect, the strong analogical interaction between the imperative forms of simple verbs of the ե and ի conjugations is especially remarkable. Whereas in some dialects the original distinction between active vs. medio-passive inflection has been preserved, in other dialects simple verbs of the former ե and ի conjugations have coalesced into a single conjugation type partially or fully, whereby either the ending -իր or -է (< Old Arm.-եա՛) of the 2 sg. Imperative has been generalized as a result of analogical extension. Furthermore, on the one hand, the final ր of the Imperative sg. ending -իր has been lost either by phonetic change or by analogy in a number of dialects, and on the other hand, the final vowel -է (going back to the Old Armenian diphthong -եա՛) of the 2 sg. Imperative has undergone further change է>ի in the same dialectal areas. Hence, the final ի of the 2 sg. Imperative in such cases may in principle have resulted either from the phonetic and/or analogical loss of the final ր in the ending -իր or from the phonetic change է>ի. It is not infrequently hard to say unequivocally which of the two aforementioned developments is responsible for the appearance of the form in question. Besides, it is sometimes far from clear whether phonetic change or analogy has entailed the actual disappearance of the final ր in the ending -իր in a particular dialect. In this respect, the retention vs. loss of the final ր in the 2 sg. Imperative of irregular verbs mainly serves as a guideline for revealing the actual cause (namely, articulatory vs. analogical motivation) of the lack of the final ր in the 2 sg. Imperative of regular verbs, though the final ր of the 2 sg. Imperative of some irregular verbs is likely to have been restored secondarily by analogy with the 2 pl. Imperative in a few instances.

Gasp! The reality of ingressive speech in contemporary French

Pulmonic ingressive speech, the use of an inhalation airstream in speech, serves a set of similar paralinguistic functions in a wide variety of languages (Eklund, 2007). This phenomenon is most closely associated with Swedish and related languages (Eklund, 2008), affirmative particles (Eklund, 2007), and female speakers (Clarke andMelchers, 2005). It is known to be highly interactive and therefore difficult to elicit (Eklund, 2002). While acknowledged to exist in French, particularly used by women on the word oui “yes” when expressing “reticence” (Léon, 1992), this mode of articulation and its uses have yet to be described systematically in that language. In this study, we extracted all tokens of ingressive oui produced spontaneously over one season (338 min) of the reality television series L’Agence, yielding 14 tokens. A detailed analysis of each in context, combined with observations from native speaker use and additional discourse-pragmatic observations from the study data, suggests that ingressive oui is used more often by men, is restricted to a semi-professional middle register, and is associated with final vowel devoicing, another known French phenomenon (Dalola, 2014). These data further indicate that, though rarer, ingressive oui is more perceptually salient when pronounced by a female speaker.

Comparable Encoding, Comparable Perceptual Pattern: Acoustic and Electric Hearing.

Perception with electric neuroprostheses is sometimes expected to be simulated using properly designed physical stimuli. Here, we examined a new acoustic vocoder model for electric hearing with cochlear implants (CIs) and hypothesized that comparable speech encoding can lead to comparable perceptual patterns for CI and normal hearing (NH) listeners. Speech signals were encoded using FFT-based signal processing stages including band-pass filtering, temporal envelope extraction, maxima selection, and amplitude compression and quantization. These stages were specifically implemented in the same manner by an Advanced Combination Encoder (ACE) strategy in CI processors and Gaussian-enveloped Tones (GET) or Noise (GEN) vocoders for NH. Adaptive speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in noise were measured using four Mandarin sentence corpora. Initial consonant (11 monosyllables) and final vowel (20 monosyllables) recognition were also measured. Naïve NH listeners were tested using vocoded speech with the proposed GET/GEN vocoders as well as conventional vocoders (controls). Experienced CI listeners were tested using their daily-used processors. Results showed that: 1) there was a significant training effect on GET vocoded speech perception; 2) the GEN vocoded scores (SRTs with four corpora and consonant and vowel recognition scores) as well as the phoneme-level confusion pattern matched with the CI scores better than controls. The findings suggest that the same signal encoding implementations may lead to similar perceptual patterns simultaneously in multiple perception tasks. This study highlights the importance of faithfully replicating all signal processing stages in the modeling of perceptual patterns in sensory neuroprostheses. This approach has the potential to enhance our understanding of CI perception and accelerate the engineering of prosthetic interventions. The GET/GEN MATLAB program is freely available at https://github.com/BetterCI/GETVocoder.

Neural correlates of lexical stress processing in a foreign free-stress language.

The paper examines the discrimination of lexical stress contrasts in a foreign language from a neural perspective. The aim of the study was to identify the areas associated with word stress processing (in comparison with vowel processing), when listeners of a fixed-stress language have to process stress in a foreign free-stress language. We asked French-speaking participants to process stress and vowel contrasts in Spanish, a foreign language that the participants did not know. Participants performed a discrimination task on Spanish word pairs differing either with respect to word stress (penultimate or final stressed word) or with respect to the final vowel while functional magnetic resonance imaging data was acquired. Behavioral results showed lower accuracy and longer reaction times for discriminating stress contrasts than vowel contrasts. The contrast Stress>Vowel revealed an increased bilateral activation of regions shown to be associated with stress processing (i.e., supplementary motor area, insula, middle/superior temporal gyrus), as well as a stronger involvement of areas related to more domain-general cognitive control functions (i.e., bilateral inferior frontal gyrus). The contrast Vowel>Stress showed an increased activation in regions typically associated with the default mode network (known for decreasing its activity during attentionally more demanding tasks). When processing Spanish stress contrasts as compared to processing vowel contrasts, native listeners of French activated to a higher degree anterior networks including regions related to cognitive control. They also show a decrease in regions related to the default mode network. These findings, together with the behavioral results, reflect the higher cognitive demand, and therefore, the larger difficulties, for French-speaking listeners during stress processing as compared to vowel processing.

Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction.

Grammatical tone mapping in Ekegusii

AbstractA major issue in Bantu morphophonology is how to get the right tones in the right ‘cells’ in the verb paradigm. In many Bantu languages, grammatical tones are assigned to different positions in the verb stem depending on inflectional features of tense, aspect, mood (TAM), polarity and clause type: The same TAM may assign different tones (and different segmental allomorphs) in the affirmative vs. negative and in main vs. relative clauses. Although such ‘melodic tones’ (Odden & Bickmore 2014) are typically restricted to the verb stem (root + suffixes), often also the domain of vowel harmony and other segmental phonology, both the presence and mapping of grammatical tones within the stem cannot be determined without reference to the prefixal inflectional marking of subject, negation, TAM and object which precede the stem. In this article, we discuss three cases in Ekegusii, a Bantu language of Kenya, that require the stem-assigned grammatical tones to look ‘outward’ to morphological and phonological properties of such prefixes: (1) differential mapping according to whether the pre-stem tone-bearing unit is toneless, a derived H(igh) (from H-tone spreading), or underlyingly /H/ (Bickmore 1997, 1999); (2) presence of an object prefix in imperative and subjunctive forms and (3) initial/final tone agreement between the subject prefix and the final vowel of the verb (cf. Rolle & Bickmore (2022). We will show that Ekegusii provides extensive evidence that both the presence of grammatical Hs and their specific mapping, while targeting the stem (root + suffixes), must be ‘globally’ calculated on the basis of the entire morphosyntactic structure of the verb (including features exponed by prefixes).

The Analysis of Arabic Language Textbooks for Class II Elementary School

Textbooks are one of the learning resources used in the learning process. As the main learning resource, textbooks serve as a medium for educators and students in an effort to achieve learning objectives. This study aims to describe errors in textbooks. The focus of the research was done by looking at syntactic errors, vocabulary, and writing Arabic words. The source of the data in this research is the Arabic book for Class II Madrasah Ibtidaiyah written by Sunaryo Putro published by PT. Three Series of Independent Libraries, Solo. The research method used is the method of content analysis with the analytical technique used is to record the types of errors contained in the textbook. The results showed that there were 13 errors in the textbook that the author examined with details of 3 errors in syntax, in the form of an error in the final vowel of a word that is not in accordance with its maqam i'rab, 3 errors in vocabulary (mufradat) which is the vocabulary in the book. not in accordance with the actual meaning, as well as 7 errors in writing words that do not refer to the writing of Arabic words that are good and correct, in accordance with the rules of Islamic science.

Crimean Gothic sada ‘hundred’, hazer ‘thousand’

Abstract The Crimean Gothic numerals sada ‘hundred’ and hazer ‘thousand’ are not of Persian origin, as long assumed in reference works, but loanwords from Alanic or another of the closely related Iranian languages spoken to the north of the Black Sea from the mid-1st millennium BC onwards. With its final vowel, sada reflects Alanic *sade (cf. Ossetic sædæ), whereas hazer can be from Alanic *hazar or *haz(a)re (cf. Ossetic ærzæ ‘countless number, myriad’). The borrowing could have occurred anytime from the 3rd century onwards, with a date in the late 4th century most likely.

Final Vowel Loss in Lower Kasai Bantu (drc) as a Contact-Induced Change

Abstract In this article, we present a qualitative and quantitative comparative account of Final Vowel Loss (fvl) in the Bantu languages of the Lower Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We argue that this diachronic sound shift rose relatively late in Bantu language history as a contact-induced change and affected adjacent West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu languages belonging to different phylogenetic clusters. We account for its emergence and spread by resorting to two successive processes of language contact: (1) substrate influence from extinct hunter-gatherer languages in the center of innovation consisting of Bantu B80 languages, and (2) dialectal diffusion towards certain peripheral Bantu B70, C80, H40 and L10 languages.

Avoidance of final monopositional vowels

Abstract A group of Arabic dialects in Yemen exhibit a velar k in the subject suffixes of the perfect paradigm. The 1sg subject suffix surfaces in the various dialects as -ku, -k or -kw. In addition, the vocalization of the base may or may not be colored with a round vocalic quality, depending on both the realization of the suffix and the verbal type faʿal or fiʿil. Based on inquiries among speakers from Lower Yemen, we propose a path of evolution that leads from -ku to the labialized -kw, to a “colored” stem, and finally to the grammaticalization of coloration and loss of labialization. Two pressures propel the passage between stages: a functional pressure to distinguish between 1sg and 2msg, and a phonological pressure to avoid monopositional final vowels. The phonological pressure is shown to also motivate palatalization in the 2fsg -ki ⇒ -ky (⇒ -š), as well as the effect of pre-pausal nasal insertion, viz. -ku ⇒ -kum# and -ki ⇒ -kiŋ#. We further show that final vowels resulting from the interaction of the subject suffixes with object clitics are phonologically long—even if phonetically neutralized—and hence they do not violate the phonological requirement. The formal theories of strict CV (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004) and Element Theory (Kaye et al. 1985) are used to explain the a-synchronized development in the different verbal patterns, as well as the extent of the phonological ban on monopositional vowels.

The Baltic *-ā́-illative

Abstract The Lithuanian-Latvian illative was formed from the IE accusativus directivus and the local postposition *-ā́. Traces of the postponed *-ā́ have been preserved in yrà ‘is, are; OLith. there is, there are’ < *ī-r-ā́, and Lith. čià ‘here’ < *tj-ā́. Typologically, the Baltic illative can be compared to Greek derivatives with -δε, e.g. οἴκα-δε ‘homewards; at home’. As for the origin of the postponed *-ā́, two hypotheses can be formulated: 1. *-ā́ comes from the IE allative postposition *-eh₂ (see Hajnal 1992); 2. *-ā́ boils down to the instr. sg. of the anaphoric pronoun *h₁o-h₁. The primary illative plural ended in -s-ā́, e.g. OLith. (debesisa) ‘into heaven’. The postposition -na, which can be found e.g. in the ill. pl. miškúosna ‘into forests’, is an innovation resulting from reanalysis of the acc. sg. *-n + *-ā́ → *-nā́. The neutralisation of the privative opposition inessive : illative originally comprised an area much larger than today’s and included the West Aukštaitian dialect. The starting point of this neutralisation was plural forms. This primary state of affairs has remained until the present day in East Aukštaitian in the north from the line Raguva-Ukmergė-Molėtai-Salakas, where inessive sg. and illative sg. are distinguished, but inessive pl. and illative pl. are not, due to apocope of the final vowel, i.e. píevos ‘on meadows’ (= iness. pl. píevose) alongside píevos ‘onto meadows’ (= ill. pl. píevosna) (Zinkevičius 1966: 201). In the privative opposition inessive : illative, the illative form derived from the IE accusative of direction is the marked member of the opposition.

The relation of velopharyngeal coupling area to the identification of stop versus nasal consonants in North American English based on speech generated by acoustically driven vocal tract modulations

The purpose of this study was to determine the threshold of velopharyngeal coupling area at which listeners switch from identifying a consonant as a stop to a nasal in North American English, based on V1CV2 stimuli generated with a speech production model that encodes phonetic segments as relative acoustic targets. Each V1CV2 was synthesized with a set of velopharyngeal coupling functions whose area ranged from 0 to 0.1 cm2. Results show that consonants were identified by listeners as a stop when the coupling area was less than 0.035-0.057 cm2, depending on place of articulation and final vowel. The smallest coupling area (0.035 cm2) at which the stop-to-nasal switch occurred was found for an alveolar consonant in the /ɑCi/ context, whereas the largest (0.057 cm2) was for a bilabial in /ɑCɑ/. For each stimulus, the balance of oral versus nasal acoustic energy was characterized by the peak nasalance during the consonant. Stimuli with peak nasalance below 40% were mostly identified by listeners as stops, whereas those above 40% were identified as nasals. This study was intended to be a precursor to further investigations using the same model but scaled to represent the developing speech production system of male and female talkers.

The supralaryngeal articulation of stress and accent in Greek

It is well reported that articulatory movements comprising prominence units are longer, larger, and faster than their non-prominent counterparts. However, it is unclear whether these effects arise at the level of lexical stress, accent, or both, reflecting a hierarchy of prominence, i.e., being stronger when induced by accent as opposed to stress. It is also uncertain whether prominence-induced kinematic effects are invariant across positions of stress within the word, types of focus that accent denotes, and positions of words in the phrase. Here, we use an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) study to assess the supralaryngeal kinematic correlates of prominence in Greek across three stress positions (antepenultimate, penultimate, ultimate; i.e., all possible stress positions in Greek), two accentual conditions (accented and de-accented), and two phrasal positions (phrase-medial and phrase-final). Focus type is also considered, with the accentual conditions coming from two types of focus (broad and narrow), while the de-accented conditions are by default unfocused. Our results indicate that stressed syllables involve longer, larger, and faster gestures than their unstressed counterparts, regardless of the position of stress within the word. Notably, variation in velocity is accounted for by variation in displacement. Presence of accent does not further expand the stressed gestures, although it is related to minimal kinematic changes across the whole word, the exact profile of which depends on stress position. With the exception of final vowel duration, focus type is not systematically encoded in these kinematic effects. Finally, interactions are detected between the kinematic profile of prominence and that of boundaries. Implications of our findings for the hierarchy of prominence and its cross-linguistic differences are discussed, and a gestural account of prominence and boundaries is put forward.

A Historical Reconstruction of Some Pronominal Suffixes in Modern Dialectal Arabic

The morphology of the pronominal suffixes in dialectal Arabic are of particular interest for scholars of the history of Arabic for two main reasons. First, multiple dialects attest suffixes that, from a comparative perspective, apparently retain final short vowels. The second and more complicated issue concerns the vowels which precede the suffixes in the dialects, which are thought to either have been case inflecting or epenthetic. In this paper, I take up Jean Cantineau’s “embarrassing question” of how to account for the development of the vowels of the pronominal suffixes. Based on data from dialectal tanwīn in modern dialects, and attestations from pre-modern texts as well, I will argue that the pre-suffix vowels did originate in case inflecting vowels, but that no historical model heretofore proposed can satisfactorily account for how the various dialectal forms might have arisen. I identify two major historical developments and propose models for each. First, I suggest that dialects in which the pre-suffixal vowels harmonized with the suffix vowels developed via a process of harmonization across morpheme boundaries before the loss of final short vowels. For dialects in which one vowel is generalized, I argue that a post-stress neutralization took place, which led to a single vowel both before suffixes and tanwīn as well. Finally, I rely on evidence from the behavior of the suffixes to argue that the final vowel of the 3fs suffix was originally long, but that those of the 3ms, 2ms, and 2fs were most likely short.

A phonological reanalysis of morphological segment deletion and de-affrication in Ik

Abstract Ik presents a widespread pattern of allomorphy characterised by morpheme-specific segment-zero alternations (deletions) and de-affrication. Part of the process is clearly phonological because it applies to every item in the language. Final vowels are devoiced into oblivion, though they are always recoverable in Non-Domain-Final context. Case allomorphy shows various item-specific patterns, some affixes overwrite the final-vowels of roots, others do not, and others yet exhibit consonant-zero alternations. Meanwhile, interestingly, there is (ostensibly) morphologically-sensitive consonant deletion that is fully complementary with what is clearly phonological vowel deletion. In fact, an entirely phonological analysis is possible if the consonant-zero alternations are modelled by floating consonants belonging to the exponents of certain morphemes. Therefore, the item/morpheme-specific aspect of the process is actually specific to the exponent of that morpheme. This locates the whole analysis in the phonology and provides a straightforward account of the complementarity of the two deletion processes. The formal analysis is very close to what has been proposed for French, with its floating consonants and its irregular hiatus-driven vowel deletion. The analysis will then be extended to the item-specific idiosyncratic process of de-affrication that is blocked, not by coincidence, precisely in morphologically overwriting environments. In the end, all the phenomena can be accounted for in a modular analysis, provided one gets the representations right.