Durational patterns in the trisyllabic foot in Soikkola Ingrian

• Main Author: Brodskaya, Irina
• Other Authors: English Language and Literature
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: San Francisco State University 2016
• Subjects: North-Western Russia
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/162903

This paper presents a first ever quantitative analysis of the trisyllabic foot durational patterns in the Soikkola Ingrian dialect, an understudied Finnic variety of North-Western Russia on the verge of extinction. This dialect has a phonemic two-way durational contrast in vowels and a typologically rare three-way durational contrast in consonants. The acoustic analysis comprises the durational measurements of all foot nucleus segments, in a dataset of 3300 tokens collected from five speakers. The aim is to disentangle the effects of (1) the phonemic length contrasts, (2) the isochronic prosodic tendency to maintain the cumulative foot duration, and (3) the recently developed phonetic reduction in the non-initial syllables. The results show the preservance of the ternary contrast in consonants and the binary contrast in the first syllable vowels. However, the isochronic and the reductive tendencies have affected the durational contrast in the non-first vowels. The analysis shows that Soikkola Ingrian is undergoing a shift from the ???northern??? type of Finnic languages, where the second syllable vowels are contrastive in durati on regardless the structure of the first syll able, to the ???southern??? type, where the duration of the second syllable is not phonemic and highly depends on the structure of the first one.