<OT> New Posting: ROA-889

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 889-1206

 Nasal Coarticulation in the French Vowel /i/: A Phonetic and Phonological Study

Abby Spears <spearsa at email.unc.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=889


Abstract:
In this paper, I use acoustic phonetic data to examine the
phenomenon of nasal coarticulation in French.  Previous
work describes French as a language with very little vowel-nasal
(VN) coarticulation, presumably due to the oral/nasal contrast
in vowels (Cohn 1990). However, I found that the high vowel
/i/, which has no nasal counterpart in French, exhibits
a high degree of coarticulation  This finding supports the
proposal that contrast and coarticulation are inversely
correlated (Manuel 1990), adding the insight that this correlatio
n is observable even within a language.
Based on this finding and a typological survey of VN coarticulati
on, I propose an underspecification account in an Optimality
Theoretic framework to capture the patterns of VN coarticulation.
In this OT account, the interaction of markedness constraints
driving orality and minimizing effort and a faithfulness
constraint protecting the feature [+ nasal] provides an
explanation for the French data and produces the attested
typology.

Comments: 
Keywords: underspecification, coarticulation, nasal vowels, nasality, French
Areas: Phonology,Phonetics
Type: Masters Dissertation

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=889