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The focus of this article is the origins of (1) reduced vowels in languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, (2) lenition of soft stops, (3) its (pre)nasalization, (4) the change of ‑n‑ into ‑r‑ in the Tosk dialect of Albanian and a similar process in Old Romanian as well as the Istro‑Romanian, Maramuresh and Oltenian dialects of this language, a parallel change of Latin ‑l‑ into ‑r‑ in common Romanian and certain Italian dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A field-based ultrasound and acoustic study of Iwaidja, an endangered Australian Aboriginal language, investigates the phonetic identity of nonnasal velar consonants in intervocalic position, where past work has proposed a [+continuant] vs. [-continuant] phonemic contrast. We analyze the putative contrast within a continuous phonetic space, defined by both acoustic and articulatory parameters, and find gradient variation: from more consonantal realizations, such as [?], to more vocalic realizations, such as [a]. The distribution of realizations across lexical items and speakers does not support the proposed phonemic contrast. This case illustrates how lenition that is both phonetically gradient and variable across speakers and words can give the illusion of a contextually restricted phonemic contrast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the role of articulatory and perceptual factors in the change from pre- to post-aspiration in two varieties of Andalusian Spanish. In an acoustic study, the influence of stop type, speaker age, and variety on the production of pre- and post-aspiration was analyzed in isolated words produced by 24 speakers of a Western and 24 of an Eastern variety, both divided into two age groups. The results confirmed previous findings of a sound change from pre- to post-aspiration in both varieties. Velar stops showed the longest, bilabials the shortest, and dental stops intermediate pre- and post-aspiration durations. The observed universal VOTpattern was not found for younger Western Andalusian speakers who showed a particularly long VOT in /st/-sequences. A perception experiment with the same subjects as listeners showed that post-aspiration was used as a cue for distinguishing the minimal pair /pata/-/pasta/ by almost all listeners. Production-perception comparisons suggested a relationship between production and perception: subjects who produced long post-aspiration were also more sensitive to this cue. In sum, the results suggest that the sound change has first been actuated in the dental context, possibly due to a higher perceptual prominence of post-aspiration in this context, and that post-aspirated stops in Andalusian Spanish are on their way to being phonologized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the typological and geographic range of languages subjected to sociophonetic study has been expanding, though until now Australian Aboriginal languages have been absent from this subdiscipline. This first sociophonetic study of an Australian language, Murrinh Patha, shows a type of consonant lenition that is notably distinct from the better known examples in Standard Average European languages, effecting /p/ and /k/ primarily in the onset of stressed, usually word-initial syllables. Young men lenite more frequently than older men do, and paternal heritage from the neighboring Marri language group also predicts more frequent lenition. The latter influence may be the result of intense language contact brought about by recent settlement of diverse language groups at the Catholic Mission of Port Keats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some new examples of posttonic voicing/lenition by *h3 are discussed, together with the usefulness of this property in accounting for se? roots in Vedic with unaspirated root finals. Along the way, a possibly new example of aspiration of a voiced stop by *h1 is indicated. The second property of *h3 is as anlaut consonant in PIE reconstructions currently having syllabic *u as anlaut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typological work shows that voiced fricatives like /β ð/ occur more often without their voiceless counterparts than with them, contrary to what would be expected on the basis of markedness relations between voicing and obstruents. This paper suggests that many of the offending fricatives are more appropriately viewed as sonorants, whose unmarked status is to be voiced. This view has an important consequence for the interpretation of intervocalic voicing (e.g. af a > av a), which we suspect is the diachronic origin of most of the fricatives in our corpus. We propose that intervocalic voicing is sonorization, formalized in terms of the suppression of melodic material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: argues that the realization of featural affixes in mutation morphology is triggered by the constraint MaxFlt which requires that phonological material not linked to a root node (“floating features”) is fully preserved in the output. As evidence that the realization of floating features cannot be achieved by the weaker, but more general constraint Realize-Morpheme (), Wolf adduces cases where a single morphological category seems to involve mutation for multiple phonological features. In this paper, I show that the data Wolf cites are in fact morphologically complex, and exhibit well-behaved single-feature mutation under an appropriate morphological analysis. It follows that Realize Morpheme fully obviates MaxFlt for mutation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reports on a phonetic and phonological study of /t/-affrication in spontaneous British English Received Pronunciation. The study is motivated by the uncertainty surrounding plosive affrication in the literature on lenition and fortition. We suggest that a decision as to the status of a given pattern involving affrication in terms of lenition or fortition should be based on thorough phonetic and phonological analysis. We present a phonetic and phonological account of /t/-affrication, which takes into consideration the temporal and spectral characteristics of the sounds involved, as well as their distribution across phonological environments. Crucially, we compare affricated instances of /t/ with aspirated and fricated ones in the same dataset – the former arguably unmarked in this variety, the latter uncontroversially the result of lenition. We argue that the phonetic and phonological characteristics of /t/-affrication presented in this paper are consistent with an account in terms of fortition rather than lenition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas previous studies of Spanish s-weakening have relied on impressionistic coding, the present study examines temporal and gradient acoustic details in the production of /s/ by eight females from Cali, Colombia, during sociolinguistic interviews. We propose a metric for quantifying s-realization by employing three scalar-dependent variables: s-duration, centroid, and voicelessness. The results of linear regressions indicate that the dependent variables are significantly conditioned by local speaking rate, word position, following and preceding phonological context, stress, and lexical frequency. This study sheds light on how each independent variable influences s-realization acoustically. For example, as local speaking rate increases, duration, centroid, and voicelessness decrease, which is indicative of lenition, and the same weakening tendency is observed when /s/ occurs in word-final position or is followed by a nonhigh vowel, whereas frequency contributes only to s-duration. We discuss the advantages of opting for instrumental measurements over symbolic representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the process of vowel alternation in both North and West Germanic languages. It presents a discussion on n-stems which have been considered as displaying roots with different Proto-Germanic vowel grades but which actually acquired a vocalic interchange due to the effects of umlaut. Meanwhile, it cites the West Norse case, Nordic dialect which has been affected by different vowel mutations, giving rise to pseudo-ablaut.

A fundamental characteristic of human speech is that it uses a limited set of basic building blocks (phonemes, syllables), that are put to use in many different combinations to mark differences in meaning. This article investigates the evolution of such combinatorial phonology with a simulated population of agents. We first argue that it is a challenge to explain the transition from holistic to combinatorial phonology, as the first agent that has a mutation for using combinatorial speech does not benefit from this in a population of agents that use a holistic signaling system. We then present a solution for this evolutionary deadlock. We present experiments that show that when a repertoire of holistic signals is optimized for distinctiveness in a population of agents, it converges to a situation in which the signals can be analyzed as combinatorial, even though the agents are not aware of this structure. We argue that in this situation adaptations for productive combinatorial phonology can spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on results from a production experiment conducted in New Zealand, where the diphthongs [image omitted] and [image omitted] are involved in a merger-in-progress. The results suggest that the cognitive status of [image omitted] and [image omitted] word pairs as being the 'same' or 'different' is not entirely related to their production. This status could be affected by functional load: words that could lead to contextual ambiguity may seem more different than those for which the distinction is not functionally important. The results also provide evidence that an experimenter's dialect area can influence participants' production of these diphthongs. Participants in this study were met by two different experimenters from different dialect regions: New Zealand and the United States. Post hoc analysis reveals that participants who met with the US experimenter were more likely to maintain a distinction between the diphthongs than those who met with the NZ experimenter. Additionally, merged participants were more likely to report that [image omitted] and [image omitted] word pairs were distinct in their own speech if met by the US experimenter. Individuals from the US are more likely to maintain a distinction than speakers of NZE, so these results suggest that participants accommodate to the speech of an experimenter. We compare this finding with related results from a perception experiment completed by the same participants, presented in Hay, Warren, and Drager, (2006). While there appears to be a mismatch between results from production and perception, we interpret this as evidence that the observed effects are due to exposure to the experimenter and not to the distribution of participants across the different groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most familiar syntactic frameworks recognize the category 'phrase', and are built around phrase structure relationships. However, the Word Grammar dependency model does not acknowledge the category 'phrase' as a primitive in the grammar; instead, all relationships are word-based, with phrases having no syntactic status. Here, I investigate the theoretical validity of the notion 'phrase' by examining the phenomenon in Welsh known as syntactic soft mutation, contrasting a phrase-based account with a dependency account. I conclude that an empirically adequate analysis of syntactic soft mutation must make reference to phrases as a category, thus ruling out the dependency account. A further theoretical question concerns the role played in the grammar by syntactically present but phonetically unrealized elements, including empty categories such as wh-traces and unrealized material in ellipsis. Syntactic soft mutation proves an interesting testing ground in these contexts, but the data again fail to support the dependency account. The conclusion is that a phrase-based account of the mutation is better motivated and empirically more accurate than the alternative dependency account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The definition of lenition remains problematic, with several competing and at times incompatible definitions being current. What is more, some of these definitions seem to lead to paradoxes. In this paper, some of these paradoxes are considered, and a revised definition of lenition is suggested which, while being compatible with the spirit of earlier definitions, arguably avoids the problems to which those other definitions give rise. The relationship of lenition to assimilation is considered, as is the relationship between lenition and position. An argument is made that position, while important in determining where lenition might occur in individual cases, is not in itself causally linked with the processes of lenition. The question of whether strength can be equated with resistance to change is also considered, and answered in the negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the corpus of English loanwords into Fijian assembled by Schütz [Schütz, A., 1978. English loanwords in Fijian. In: Schütz, A. (Ed.), Fijian Language Studies: Borrowing and Pidginization. Bulletin of Fiji Museum No. 4, pp. 1–50] from the perspective of Optimality Theoretic faithfulness based on the notions of auditorysalience and similarity [Steraide, D., 2001. Directional asymmetries in place assimilation: a perceptual account. In: Hume, E., Johnson, K. (Eds.), The Role of Speech Perception in Phonology, Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 219–250; Steraide, D., 2001. The Phonology of Perceptibility Effects: the P-map and its Consequences for Constraint Organization. Unpublished UCLA ms]. Four topics are discussed: stress, consonant cluster resolution, variation in the form of the epenthetic vowel, and the adaptation of voiced stops. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The vocalisation of dark /l/ is widespread and on the increase in particular in those dialects which have developed a clear∼dark /l/ allophony. The phenomenon has traditionally been characterised in terms of linguistic diffusion but we claim that, provided the requisite linguistic conditions pertain, this language change is both natural and to be expected. In this sociophonological study we draw on historical, child language and cross-linguistic data to support our claim, in this Optimality Theoretic account, that /l/-vocalisation is a case of ‘the emergence of the unmarked’. In this study we concentrate on dialects of southern Britain and we analyse, in particular, a large number of tokens collected in the Fens, an area where /l/-vocalisation has only fairly recently become established and find that, in line with our expectations, vocalisation is further advanced in those Fenland areas where /l/ allophony has been established for a longer period than in those where it is a relative innovation. We also consider the linguistic contexts which tend to promote or to inhibit vocalisation and offer explanations for the variation found based on phonetic studies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents a summary of a study which investigates the typology of the Germanic n-stems. It tackles about consonant and vowel alternations which are the direct result of the interaction of the sound laws and analogies which took place during the evolution of a West Indo-European dialect which presently known as Proto-Germanic. It discusses the effect of Kluge's law on such cases. It also offers an outlook on linguists' acceptance of Kluge's law for Germanic languages.