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SUMMARY:Vowel-lenition in Cypriot Greek and its implications for consonant
 -vowel coarticulation - Eftychia Eftychiou\, Department of Linguistics
DTSTART:20071112T171500Z
DTEND:20071112T180000Z
UID:TALK9090@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Louise Radok
DESCRIPTION:The study comprises an investigation of the phenomenon of vowe
 l-lenition in Cypriot Greek (henceforth CG). The high vowels of Standard G
 reek\, /i/ and /u/\, tend to be lenited or elided when occurring in unstre
 ssed syllables and between voiceless consonants (Dauer 1980\; Arvaniti 199
 1). Although vowel-lenition is claimed to be much rarer in CG (Arvaniti 19
 99)\, impressionistic evidence suggests that the process is common in CG a
 s well. Foreign listeners claim\, for instance\, to hear only four syllabl
 es of an otherwise five-syllable word (e.g. 'epitirisi' (invigilation) hea
 rd as 'epitiris'. Native listeners report hearing the vowels\, so the stud
 y hypothesises that coarticulatory information is retained in the – now 
 final – consonant to inform the listener as to the underlying presence o
 f a vowel\; thus\, coarticulation might be a consequence of both an ease o
 f production strategy and an ease of perception strategy. \nAn experiment 
 was designed in which the two high vowels were adjacent to the alveolar fr
 icative /s/ and the alveolar stop /t/ in order to investigate the nature o
 f vowel-lenition as a categorical or gradient process and to identify poss
 ible consonant-vowel coarticulatory strategies. Results show that vowel-le
 nition in CG is a gradient phenomenon\, resulting in productions of full\,
  lenited and elided vowels. Furthermore\, consonants whose adjacent vowels
  have been elided are shown to differ from canonical word-final consonants
  through a series of acoustic measurements – such as fricative centre of
  gravity and F2 transition into a vowel\, and stop duration and preceding 
 vowel F2 transition – which suggest that traces of the vowel are always 
 present in the consonant. Finally\, it is suggested that there are two rou
 tes to reduction in CG\; one involves a full consonant with a lenited vowe
 l\, and the other involves a lenited consonant with a full vowel\, potenti
 ally signifying that the laryngeal setting is always the same but the diff
 erent gestures are a result of supralaryngeal imprecision.\n
LOCATION:GR-05\, English Faculty Building
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