|
|
 E-mail this message to a friend
|
|
Title:
|
An Acoustic Analysis of Phonological Vowel Reduction in Six Varieties of Catalan
|
|
Author:
|
Dylan Herrick
|
|
Email:
|
click here to access email
|
|
Degree Awarded:
|
University of California, Santa Cruz
, Department of Linguistics
|
|
Degree Date:
|
2003
|
|
Linguistic Subfield(s):
|
Phonetics
Phonology
|
|
Subject Language(s):
|
Catalan-Valencian-Balear
|
|
Director(s):
|
Jaye Padgett
Pilar Prieto
Armin Mester
Junko Ito
|
|
|
Abstract:
|
|
The empirical focus of this dissertation is a quantitative acoustic study of six regional varieties of Catalan – a Romance language spoken primarily in northeastern Spain. Chapter One provides a brief historical background on Catalan as well as a description of the patterns of vowel reduction found in each of the six regional varieties; Bages (Eastern: Central Catalan), Girona (Eastern: Central Catalan), Palma (Eastern: Balearic Catalan), Lloseta (Eastern: Balearic Catalan), Ciutadella (Eastern: Balearic Catalan), and Lleida (Western: North-western Catalan). The remaining chapters provide more detail on the theoretical background (Chapter Two), the experimental methodology (Chapter Three), the acoustic data (Chapter Four), and a discussion of some of the theoretical implications of the data (Chapter Five). Appendix IV presents the F1-F3 data for each of the 2640 vowel tokens measured.
The principal findings of this dissertation are that i) the acoustic data (largely) support the impressionistic descriptions of the six varieties studied, ii) the primary characteristic of Catalan vowel reduction is raising (not centralization) and therefore supports the phonetic explanation to vowel raising given in Crosswhite (1999, to appear), Flemming (1995, to appear), and Barnes (2002), iii) the F1 raising attested in the data matches the predicted amount of raising (and never exceeds this amount) for all six varieties, iv) vowels are not evenly spaced throughout the vowel space, and v) the attested minimal distance between neighboring vowels is always smaller than the theoretically predicted minimal distance.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Page Updated: 29-Nov-2009
Please report any bad links or misclassified data
LINGUIST Homepage | Read
LINGUIST | Contact us
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed
on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.
|
|
