The role of contextual and prosodic factors on consonant lenition and elision. The case of intervocalic [j] in Majorcan Catalan

Abstract

This paper looks for an interpretation of the phonetic factors causing consonant lenition and elision to occur through an analysis of intervocalic [j] in Majorcan, a dialect of Catalan spoken in the Mediterranean island of Majorca. Articulatory and acoustic data for several Majorcan Catalan speakers still producing the palatal glide in all word positions and segmental environments show that the consonant is lower and more variable in intervocalic position than word initially and word finally. Lowering is enhanced by the presence of contextual low and mid low front vowels, mostly so if stressed and placed immediately after the palatal glide. Inspection of [VjV] formant trajectories suggests that, in spite of undergoing articulatory reduction, [j] is produced with an independent articulatory gesture; moreover, coarticulatory effects between the palatal glide and the following vowel may render the former phonetic segment perceptually indistinguishable from the latter and thus prone to undergo elision. Strongly lenited variants of intervocalic [j] appear to be receding, and conservative speakers show specially low realizations of the palatal glide which may have been widely spread among the speaking population at the time that the intervocalic consonant underwent systematic elision in some areas of Majorca in the past. These findings are in support of the notion that the lenition and subsequent elision of intervocalic consonants are assisted by contextual and prosodic factors.

La realización de <ll> y <y> en el corpus Fonología del Español Contemporáneo (FEC): categorización acústica del continuum entre oclusión y elisión

“…Este valor de F2 revela una posición más atrasada que la lateral [ʎ], también deducida por las transiciones suaves y muy inclinadas por la posterioridad de las vocales que rodean a la consonante. El oscilograma 18 Sobre los rasgos articulatorios y acústicos de /ʎ/ en catalán, pueden consultarse Recasens (1991Recasens ( , 2013Recasens ( y 2014; Recasens y Espinosa (2005y 2006. refleja la continuidad de energía acústica con respecto a las vocales que la rodean y la menor intensidad de la consonante, rasgos típicos de una realización aproximante Figura 6.…”

On the articulatory classification of (alveolo)palatal consonants

“…Thus, the (dento)alveolar stop consonants [] have been reported to be more anterior, apicolamino-dental in French and more posterior, apico-alveolar in English (Dart 1991). Moreover, analogously to the relationship between [ʎ] and [ ɲ], also dark // may be articulated further forward than the other alveolars in English and than clear // in French (see Recasens & Espinosa 2005, for references).…”

Response to Martin Ball & Joan Rahilly, ‘The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA’,JIPA41 (2011), 231–237

“…essentially the vowels [ ɯ] and the corresponding glides [ ɥ ɰ], which renders somewhat awkward the use of the symbol [ɰ] rather than [] for representing a velar approximant (see Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996: 322) and IPA (1999: 121) regarding the presence of [ɰ] as a glide in languages such as Axininca and Korean). Glides may exhibit dialect-dependent differences in degree of opening (Maddieson 1984b), and thus close cognates such as those occurring syllable-initially in Spanish (see [] in (iii) below), and open ones such as those found in intervocalic word-medial position in Majorcan Catalan ([ˈə] palla ‘straw’; Recasens & Espinosa 2005). The raised and lowered diacritics may thus be used for transcribing these close and open phonetic variants.…”