Reconstructing phonological change: duration and syllable structure in Latin vowel reduction

Phonetic reduction, vowel duration, and prosodic structure

Word frequency, phonological neighborhood density, semantic predictability in context, and discourse mention have all been previously found to cause reduction of vowels. Other researchers have suggested that reduction based on these factors is reflective of a unified process in which “redundant” or “predictable” elements are reduced, and that this reduction is largely mediated by prosody. Using...

The Syllable in Phonological and Prosodic Structure

Although in some languages there are phonological distinctions between syllabic and nonsyllabic segments, and between accented and unaccented segments. There is reason to believe that neither syllables nor accent-groups (measures) are present in the phonological representations of words in permanent memory. Syllables and other prosodic structures are characteristically predictable from segmenta...

Vowel duration, syllable quantity and stress in Dutch

Effects of vowel length and syllable structure on segment duration in Dutch

The present study concerns the durational properties of minimal Dutch word pairs containing long and short vowels as a specific case study of the mapping between phonological and phonetic notions of timing. In Experiment 1, duration of the postvocalic stop consonant in CV( : ) Cən words did not vary as a function of preceding vowel length. Experiment 2 extended this finding to intervocalic stop...

Latin syllable structure in typological perspective

Three parameters are considered in the typology of Latin syllable structure: 1) phonotaxis of syllable structure, 2) correspondence of syllable structure with morpheme structure, 3) syllable structure processes. With respect to these parameters, Latin may be characterized as follows: 1. Latin allows moderate complexity of the onset, which, during its history, gets further reduced. Similarly, co...