Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2019

Published In

Proceedings Of The Workshop On Turkic And Languages In Contact With Turkic

Abstract

This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz to address a range of questions about the nature of this contrast, and also explores factors that affect (phonetic) duration in short vowels. Measurement and analysis of the vowels confirms that there is indeed a significant duration distinction between the Kyrgyz vowel categories referred to as short and long vowels. Preliminary midpoint formant measurements show that there may be some accompanying spectral component to the length contrast for certain vowels, but findings are not conclusive. A comparison of F0 dynamics and spectral dynamics through long and short vowels does not yield evidence that some long vowels may in fact be two heterosyllabic short vowels. Analysis shows that duration is associated with a vowel’s presence in word-edge syllables in Kyrgyz, as anticipated based on descriptions of word-final stress and initial prominence. However, high vowels and non-high vowels are found to consistently exhibit opposite durational effects. Specifically, high vowels in word-edge syllables are longer than high vowels in medial syllables, while non-high vowels in word-edge syllables are shorter than non-high vowels in medial syllables. This suggests either a phenomenon of durational neutralisation at word edges or the exaggeration of durational differences word-medially, and is not taken as a case of word-edge strengthening. Proposals for how to select from between these hypotheses in future work are discussed.

Keywords

Turkic languages, acoustic phonetics, Kyrgyz, vowel duration, vowel length, edge effects

Editor(s)

P. Jeretič and Y. Sağ

Conference

4th Workshop On Turkic And Languages In Contact With Turkic

Conference Dates

February 16-17, 2019

Conference Location

New York, NY

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Comments

This work is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

Download

Included in

Linguistics Commons

Share

COinS