Since next Monday is Easter Monday, our meeting will be temporally moved to Wednesday, April 8, 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom.
Naomi Sacks will be presenting her study Vowel Hiatus Resolution in Mora-Timed Languages: Determining the Syllabicity of Adjacent Vowels in Japanese.
Abstract: Vowel hiatus, or adjacent, heterosyllabic vowels, are a crosslinguistically dispreferred phenomenon. Vowel hiatus may be resolved in various ways, including elision of one vowel, consonant epenthesis, vowel fusion, glide formation, and diphthongization. It can be difficult to determine whether vowel hiatus has been successfully resolved (turning into a monosyllabic long vowel) or not (two short vowels in different syllables) when the adjacent vowels are identical. In Japanese, pitch accent is expressed over the entirety of the syllable. Using voice recordings of a native speaker, I use changes in F0 to identify instances where vowel hiatus is resolved and where it is not. I find instances in which same vowel-sequences can audibly exhibit a contrast between long vowels and short, heterosyllabic vowels.
All relevant documents (schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) will be available on this Google Drive.