Temporal patterns of quantity in Inari Saami

Ural-Alraic Studies, 2023

The aim of this paper is to present a revision of the phonological system of Kildin Saami. This revision is based on the results of a computational analysis of the Kildin vowel inventory. Specifically, a number of segments that have been variously described by different scholars as either diphthongs or monophthongs have been examined using two automatic methods: trajectory length and changepoint detection. These methods were tested on the material of Estonian and Lithuanian before the examination of the Kildin data. The data analyzed in this research was collected during fieldwork in the city of Murmansk, the rural locality of Lujaavv'r (Lovozero), and the urban locality of Verkhnetulomsky in the Murmansk Oblast of Russia in 2021 and 2022. Computational analysis revealed that the segments analyzed by some scholars as diphthongs /ie/ and /ea/ are monophthongs /eː/ and /aː/ occurring after palatal and palatalized consonants. The low back vowels analyzed sometimes as diphthongs /oa/ and /oaː/ are monophthongs /ɒ/ and /ɒː/. The first component of /ua/ is acoustically closer to /o(ː)/ than to /u(ː)/. The phonetic quality of /ue/ remains to be defined. It is proposed to analyze this phoneme as having three allophones in free variation, diphthong [ʊə] (or even [ɔə]) and monophthongs [ɵː] and [əː]. /i/ and /ɨ/ were shown to be in contrastive distribution only word-initially if Russian loanwords are taken into consideration, so /i/ should be considered a marginal phoneme. /i/-final diphthongs and triphthongs are proposed not to be postulated and analyzed instead as combinations of vowels with /j/ or /jː/. The vowel inventory thus comprises two diphthongs and thirteen monophthongs.

2011

The article discusses the main paradigm of Estonian word prosodytriple opposition of phonetic quantity in disyllabic footas manifested in fluent speech. Statistical methods are used to find out which of the characteristics of quantity degrees are essential and on what conditions they occur. The word structure under investigation is CV(::)CV. As revealed by statistical analysis, the duration ratio of the stressed vs. unstressed syllable is still the primary feature distinguishing between the Estonian quantity degrees. The tonal component, pitch, is also important, but instead of the characteristics of the tonal peak (or turning point TP), which is changeable and malleable by other factors, the most significant of the possible alternative features should rather be seen in the ratio of the mean F0 values of the stressed and unstressed syllables. Another sufficiently relevant feature is the position of the word in the phrase (final vs. non-final), while different models apply to content and function words. Intensity and stressedness of words turned out to be marginal for the given material.

1999

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics, 2011

This paper analyzes a variety of languages with regard to vowel alternation patterns in their disyllabic sound symbolic reduplicatives (DSRs). The analysis reveals that (1) a number of different languages have their preferred patterns of vowel alternation for DSRs (e.g. /ɪ/-/ɒ/ in ding-dong and tick-tock in English) and (2) the relative height of each vowel against the other in a DSR is a linguistic feature that is primarily areal. The languages surveyed in this paper include Bukharan Tajik, Chinese, English, German, Kazakh, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Persian, Qarakhanid Turkic, Tatar, Tatar in Xinjiang, Turkish, Tuvan, Uyghur, Uzbek, and Uzbek in Xinjiang.

Previous studies have shown that the system of contrasts in a given language plays a significant role in determining certain contextual modifications stemming from coarticulation or the acoustic realization of stress. they argue that a limit on coarticulation occurs in cases where a high degree of coarticulation and its corresponding acoustic consequences would decrease the saliency of the relevant contrast. the current study investigates the role of contrastive vowel length in limiting the amount of contextual modification of vowel duration. More precisely, the interaction between vowel length contrast and the stop voicing effect is analyzed. The stop voicing effect results in vowel duration differences depending on whether the following obstruent is voiced or voiceless. the hypothesis is that the presence of vowel length contrast will inhibit the voicing effect, given that contextual variability of duration might blur a contrast based on length. this prediction is tested on lithuanian, which has an asymmetrical vowel length system: only high and low vowels are contrastive for this dimension; mid vowels are always long. the experimental results show that the voicing effect is stronger for mid vowels, supporting the hypothesis that the presence of a length contrast attenuates the contextual effects on vowel duration.

Linguistic Typology, 25(2), 389-400. doi: 10.1515/lingty-2020-2066, 2020

Although this book was published in the "Studies in Laboratory Phonology" series, you will find hardly any laboratory phonology in it. Instead, you will discover plenty of excellent phonological typology intertwined with historical phonologyprobably a much rarer find. Until very recently, phonological typology was only marginally present within mainstream linguistic typology, being barely recognised as a subfield in its own right. The last few years have seen a gradual change: two synthesising volumes, both entitled Phonological Typology, have appeared (Gordon 2016; Hyman and Plank 2018) and the first workshop on this topic was held at ALT 2019 (Grossman and Moran 2019). At that meeting, the very first Greenberg Award (a prize of the Association for Linguistic Typology for outstanding typological dissertations) was given out in phonologyand it went to the thesis on which the present book is based. The task of reviewing the resulting volume is both pleasant and challenging: this open-access volume appears as a new landmark in typological studies on syllable structure and a sine qua non for future research in the field.

Speech Prosody, 2020

Current research in typology has shown that durational effects at the phonetic level can have a profound impact on vowel length. Quantity languages, for instance, often display constraints on final lengthening in order to maintain contrasts between short and long vowels. We contribute to this typology by considering two closely related Italo-Romance varieties, Genoese and Ventimigliese, which differ in one crucial feature, namely vowel length. According to the literature, quantity contrasts should be well-attested in Genoese but not in Ventimigliese. An acoustic analysis based on the duration of stressed syllables suggests that the two varieties may be different not so much in vowel length as in their intonation. Unlike Genoese, Ventimigliese displays longer syllables in the utterance-internal than in the final position. This could be due to the pressure of the Ventimigliese utterance-internal position to adjust to a higher F0. It remains to be seen whether this is due to differences in tone structure. All in all, we claim that only a comprehensive study of prosody and intonation can enlighten durational patterns in language typology.

2004

There have been discussions and studies concerning the possible influence of the postvocalic consonant on the discrimination of /V˘C/ and /VC˘/ words in Swedish. This study uses manipulations of durations in two series – one with changing of vowel duration only and one with changing of vowel and consonant duration in combination. Native Swedish listeners decided whether they perceived test words as original quantity type or not. The results indicate that the complementary consonant duration has an influence only on the vowel phonemes that have great spectral differences between long and short vowel allophone, in this case /a / and /¨ /. Test words containing /E / and /O / were affected by vowel duration only. The study also includes naturalness judgements of the test words, and here the post-vocalic consonant duration did not have any systematic influence on naturalness.

Fonetik19, 2019

This paper investigates the effect of the surrounding vowel on the quality and duration of the Estonian intervocalic /l/. Previous studies have shown that quantity affects the quality and duration of consonants in Estonian, but how the different environing vowels affect the consonant in interaction with three quantity degrees is mostly unclear. The results revealed that in the context of front vowels /e i/ the consonants F1 was lower and F2 higher as compared to back vowels /a u/. The quality of /l/ was affected by quantity, the gender of the subject and the position of the test word in the utterance. The surrounding vowel affected the duration of /l/ in three quantity degrees. The duration of the intervocalic /l/ was longer in the context of high vowels /i u/. Compared to test words in the utterance-medial position, the duration of /l/ was longer in the utterance-final position. Gender affected the duration of /l/, which was shorter for male subjects. The results suggest that the quality and duration of the intervocalic /l/ is dependent on the quality of the environing vowels and thus not fixed.