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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Summary Details


Query:   Sum. of Query: Hiatus Resolution Across Glottals
Author:  Marianne Borroff
Submitter Email:  click here to access email
Linguistic LingField(s):   Phonology

Summary:   Dear Linguists,

On 5/18, I submitted a query to Linguist List regarding the interaction of vowels across glottals, particularly the tendency of some languages to exhibit hiatus resolution-like patterns across glottals. The query asked whether any linguists had noticed such patterns in the course of their research. I received a number of interesting and helpful replies, a summary of which is given below.

The following sources were cited as dealing with hiatus resolution across glottals, or as dealing with related phenomena:

-Casali, R. 1997. ''Vowel elision in hiatus contexts: Which vowel goes?'' Language 73: 493-533.

-Dilley, L., S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, and M. Ostendorf. 1996.
?Glottalization of word-initial vowels as a function of prosodic structure.? Journal of Phonetics 24: 423-444.

-Ladefoged, P. and I. Maddieson. 1996. Sounds of the World's Languages. Blackwells.

-Picard, M. 2003. ''On the emergence and resolution of hiatus.'' Folia Linguistica Historica 24: 47-57.

-Scott, C. T. 1964. ''Syllable Structure in Teheran Persian.'' Anthropological Linguistics 5, vol.1: 27-30.

Other issues discussed included the difficulty of distinguishing glottal stop from creaky phonation, because the former is not characterized by immediate cessation of the vocal folds. I thank Mark Jones (Cambridge) who pointed out that the glottal element in V?V may either be attributed to an underlying stop or to a voice-quality distinction. If it is the latter, then the fact that hiatus resolution-like processes occur across the glottal element is not unexpected since no consonant intervenes between the two vowels. This response identified an important issue in confronting V?V and VhV sequences, which must be taken into account in further research on the subject.

Thanks to Mark Jones (Cambridge), Marc Picard (Concordia) and Charles T. Scott (Wisconsin) for their helpful and insightful responses to the original query.

LL Issue: 15.2027
Date Posted: 29-Jun-2004
Original Query: Read original query


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