Recent advances in Q Theory: Segment strength

Abstract

Using Q Theory, in which canonical segments are represented as a sequence of three subsegments, this paper develops a scale of vowel quantity, ranging from 'superlight' single v subsegments to 'heavy' or geminate vowels consisting of four subsegments. An Optimality-Theoretic analysis of quantitysensitive stress assignment is developed, in which stress is preferred on vowels with more subsegments. A case study of the Jê language Panãra demonstrates that a single language can draw a four-way vowel quantity contrast, to which the stress system is sensitive.

Micro‐prosody

“…An important aspect of the above approaches is that they specify temporal overlap between epochs of phonological control, even if that overlap is in the service of achieving linearly ordered phonetic targets. This distinguishes them from Q-theory, an alternative representation proposal, which decomposes segments into discrete, linearly ordered temporal intervals (Garvin et al, 2018;Schwarz et al, 2019;Shih & Inkelas, 2018). The decomposition of a segment into Q's is similar in one sense to the decomposition of a gesture into closure, hold and release phases.…”