Compensatory lengthening and structure preservation revisited

Abstract

In de Chene & Anderson's (1979) article on compensatory lengthening, the authors make two strong claims as to the universal nature of compensatory lengthening. These claims are: (i) that compensatory lengthening occurs in two stages, involving the weakening of a consonant to a glide and the subsequent merger of the resulting diphthong; and (ii) that compensatory lengthening can only occur when there is a pre-existing vowel-length contrast in the language in question.Both of these claims have received considerable attention in the literature. The first claim has never gained widespread acceptance, and has been challenged in several studies. Challenges have come from, for example, Hock (1986), Poser (1986), Sezer (1986) and more recently Gildea (1995). Each of these scholars provides a strong case against the view that compensatory lengthening is always decomposable into two distinct stages. The ensemble of their arguments renders this claim simply untenable.The second claim has gained widespread acceptance, as discussed below. Nevertheless, it has been challenged by a few scholars, for example, Hock (1986), Hayes (1989), Morin (1992) and Lin (1997). Hock (1986) mentions in a footnote that this claim is also ' dubious, except maybe as a tendency', citing as a counterexample final /h/-deletion in Andalusian Spanish, with compensatory lengthening and no pre-existing vowel length contrast. Hayes (1989), in another important article on compensatory lengthening, suggests that, according to moraic theory, a pre-existing distinction between heavy and light syllables should be a sufficient condition to allow compensatory lengthening to occur. Hayes mentions two cases that he knows of that bear out his prediction: Ilokano and, citing * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1997 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Chicago. I wish to thank the audience there, and Stuart Davis in particular. I also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for Phonology, as well as the anonymous associate editor, whose comments on earlier versions of this article led to substantial improvements.

1 Length and weight in Romance

“…They then use this claim to argue that compensatory lengthening produced by processes such as monophthongization and coda consonant loss were facilitated by the existence of long vowels of hiatus origin. However, their claim has been challenged by Gess (1998) on the basis of metrical evidence for the chronology of coalescence (cf. Kavitskaya 2017 for a rejoinder) and by Morin (2012) on the basis of relative chronology.…”

Phonetic variation and its spatial distribution in urban Austria: /l/-vocalization as a sociolinguistic marker?

“…The process of /l/-vocalization, referring to the phonetic process of transforming a lateral alveolar approximant into a vowel in certain positions, can be found in numerous languages and varieties around the world. It occurs in Old French (Gess, 1998(Gess, , 2003, Brazilian Portuguese (Noll, 1999:53), Dutch (Kranzmayer, 1956;Rein, 1974:21), Serbo-Croatian (Kenstowicz, 1994), Polish, Belearic Catalan, and Mehri (Walsh Dickey, 1997). Additionally, /l/-vocalization has been studied with regard to several varieties of English, including numerous British and American dialects, Australian and New Zealand English, and the English variety spoken on the Falkland Islands (Ash, 1982;Borowsky, 2001;Horvath & Horvath, 2001;Johnson & Britain, 2007;Sudbury, 2001), but also in a number of Mongolian, Uralic, Goidelic, and Slavic languages (Stadnik, 2002) and, not least, in the German language.…”