Schwa in phonological theory

Oostendorp, M. van

doi:10.1515/9783110890952.431

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The process in which a schwa is reduced to zero under the influence of a vowel is frequently attested (cf. van Oostendorp 1998, and references cited there). Furthermore, there are dialects with a paradigm similar to Hellendoorn Dutch, like for instance Winterswijk Dutch, in which the schwa-affix is present in the first person singular in all possible word orders.…”

Section: The Phi-feature Specification Of the Affixes In Hellendoorn mentioning

confidence: 97%

The distribution of phi-features in pronouns

Koppen

2011

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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This paper focuses on the question which phi-features are associated with pronouns and how these features are distributed over their internal structure. I argue that pronouns contain Participant and Individuation features (Harley and Ritter 2002). The Participant features and the Individuation features are merged as discrete sets of features which can be targeted for syntactic operations like Agree independently from the other phi-features associated with pronouns. These feature sets are merged and end up on the maximal projection of the pronoun as one feature bundle.The core data of this paper are constituted by Complementizer Agreement (CA) in Dutch dialects (cf. Haegeman 1992;Zwart 1993). In (the mostly West-Germanic) dialects with CA, the subject of an embedded clause agrees with both the finite verb, and with the complementizer introducing the embedded clause. I show that there are two types of CA dialects. In the first type, the complementizer and the finite verb have the same ending. In the second type, the so-called Double Agreement (DA) dialects, however, the complementizer and the finite verb do not have the same affix. What has gone unnoticed in the literature until now is that these two types of CA dialects can be distinguished on the basis of two more properties: CA in the DA dialects is sensitive to (i) extraction of the embedded subject pronoun to a higher clause and (ii) modification of the subject pronoun by a focus particle. I argue that the differences between these two types of CA can be explained if C does not target the same Goal in these dialects. In the DA dialects CA is the result of a Probe agreeing with the Participant features inside the pronominal structure, whereas CA in the other dialects reflects agreement with the top node of this pronominal structure.

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Section: The Phi-feature Specification Of the Affixes In Hellendoorn mentioning

confidence: 97%

The distribution of phi-features in pronouns

Koppen

2011

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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“…We believe that the latter stems from the quality of the vowel: in most languages, including English, schwa-like vowels cannot be stressed (e.g. van Oostendorp 1998). In view of this, some structure other than (22d) will be preferred for underlyingly placeless definite articles.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Articles in Turkish/English interlanguage revisited: Implications of vowel harmony

Goad¹,

White²

2009

Second Language Acquisition of Articles

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and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion. Special thanks to Ays7 e Gürel for organizing the testing in Turkey. This research was funded by grants from SSHRCC and FQRSC. 1 There is some dispute about the status of unstressed bir. Kornfilt (1997) considers it to be an article, while Underhill (1976) treats it is a numeral. Lyons (1999) refers to it as a 'quasi indefinite article', but argues that definiteness is not grammaticalized in Turkish (see also Öztürk 2005). 2 Although [È] is the symbol typically used to represent the high back unrounded vowel in the literature on Turkish, we have chosen to use [¨] instead, as the central-back distinction becomes relevant in the manifestation of harmony in the L2 (see section 5).

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“…One clue that a syllable is a candidate for optional deletion is that the vowel is unstressed and centralized (typically transcribed as [ə] in English) and occurs in a syllable adjacent to another schwa (Oshika, Zue,Weeks, Neu, & Aurbach, 1975). That these vowels are reduced, and not "stable schwas" which are underlyingly present in the phonological form (van Oostendorp, 1999), can be justified by the presence of a full vowel in the same position in other morphological forms of the word, as in the three distinct cases of reduction seen in "photograph" [fotəgraef] versus "photography" [fətɑgrəfi]. The process of vowel reduction in stress-timed languages is rule-governed in that it is restricted to unstressed syllables, which may then undergo a secondary phonological process of deletion (LoCasto & Connine, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Durational variability of schwa in early and late Spanish–English bilinguals

Emily

Yavaş

2014

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Aims: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether bilinguals categorically displayed shorter or longer schwa durations between fixed word pairs where one word contains a deletable syllable and the other does not (as in "rational" [raeʃənəl] → [raeʃnəl] compared with "rationality" [raeʃənaeləti]). We hypothesized that monolingual and early bilingual speakers would produce shorter values for "deletable" schwas whereas late bilinguals would not. Methodology: Twenty native English speakers and 40 Miami-based Spanish-English bilinguals (20 early and 20 late bilinguals) were asked to read sentences containing target words from 10 semantically related word pairs. Analysis: A three-way mixed model ANOVA was performed to determine the relationship between schwa duration and the following factors: language group, word root, and deletable/nondeletable category. Pairwise t-tests were also performed on individual categories to determine if semantically related pairs differed in duration. Conclusions: Results indicated that native English speakers produce significantly shorter durations for schwa in deletable versus non-deletable position. Early bilingual productions are very similar to those of English-only speakers, whereas late bilinguals display much longer durations in both categories. Originality: This study is the first to directly compare word-internal vowel duration patterns in Spanish-English bilingual speakers. Implications: These results indicate that age of L2 acquisition is a predictive factor in determining how native-like an L2 speaker's pronunciation of reduced vowels will be. Limitations: Given the specific nature of the word pairs tested, a reading instrument was the most efficient manner of eliciting target word pairs. Future studies should try to evaluate this issue using other types of stimuli.

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Schwa in phonological theory

Cited by 8 publications

References 9 publications

The distribution of phi-features in pronouns

The distribution of phi-features in pronouns

Articles in Turkish/English interlanguage revisited: Implications of vowel harmony

Durational variability of schwa in early and late Spanish–English bilinguals

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