Vowel prothesis before /r/ revisited: acoustics and typology
Vowel prothesis is a phonological process by which a vowel is inserted at the beginning of a word. Vowel prothesis before a rhotic is attested in a number of languages of the world and has been discussed by Hall (2011), where the instantiation of this phenomenon in the Walliser dialect of Swiss Germ...
| Published in: | Glossa: a journal of general linguistics |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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Open Library of Humanities
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1406 https://doaj.org/article/7e2a93dbe2644ecb8f5ca218f8f104ff |
| Summary: | Vowel prothesis is a phonological process by which a vowel is inserted at the beginning of a word. Vowel prothesis before a rhotic is attested in a number of languages of the world and has been discussed by Hall (2011), where the instantiation of this phenomenon in the Walliser dialect of Swiss German received a theoretical treatment couched in the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). In this paper, I revisit that process of vowel prothesis and discuss vowel prothesis before /r/ in light of the phonetics of such a development as well as the typology of such a change. It will be argued that vowel prothesis before a rhotic only comes about when that rhotic is a trill. This is because trilled rhotics in the world’s languages are known to involve a brief vocalic period (roughly 50 ms) prior to the onset of vibration. Furthermore, all languages with an attested change of #rV- → #VrV- e.g. Walliser German, Campidanian Sardinian, Basque, Gascon and Sakha (Yakut) have an alveolar trilled /r/. In terms of OT, I analyze this as due to a high-ranking constraint against trills in the prosodic-word initial position, formulated as *ω[Trill. |
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