Schwa

It has so often been pointed out that Tamazight and Tarifiyt eschew the occurrence of schwa in open syllables. We take this as a starting point and propose that a constraint is active in the grammar of Amazigh that bans schwa from being associated with a mora. The effects of this constraint are so pervasive in the grammar of the language that further unrelated phonological and morpho-phonological phenomena ensue from it. Schwa never participates in morphological-prosodic weight-sensitive vowel epenthesis, it does not contribute to the weight of closed syllables for stress assignment reasons, nor does it fill a vacant mora in compensatory lengthening.

This paper describes a cross-modality investigation of the perception of long-distance coarticulation. We present the results of a sign study investigating anticipatory location-to-location (LL) effects in American Sign Language (ASL), and compare these findings with results of analogous research on anticipatory vowel-to-vowel (VV) effects in English. While listeners in speech studies showed great sensitivity to coarticulatory effects, relatively little evidence of sensitivity to coarticulation was found among sign study participants, even for the closest-distance effects. This was the case for both signing and sign-naive subjects. In addition, deaf subjects’ results were not significantly influenced by their ages of acquisition of ASL. These results parallel those of earlier research finding that LL coarticulatory effects in ASL appear to be weaker than the coarticulatory effects that are present in speech, at least in the contexts examined here. The outcome of this perception study may thus be due to the apparent weakness of coarticulatory information in the sign signal relative to the speech signal: to the extent that such information is available, users will tend to make use of it, as appears to be the case in speech perception. Where such information is not generally available, users will be less accustomed to making use of it even in cases in which it is present.

In this study, we examine the nature and content of some phonetic/ phonological designations to refer to central vowels. Bearing in mind that epenthetic vowels and unmarked vowels are not always central vowels, we will argue in favour of a thorough distinction between these designations and propose the use of: 1. 'Central vowels' to label vowels articulated along the central axis the of oral cavity, 2. 'epenthetic vowels' to refer to postlexically inserted vowels in order to regularize exceptional consonant strings, 3. 'unmarked vowels' to indicate the most frequent epenthetic vowels of a language. Additionally, the term 'schwa' is judged not strictly necessary to phonetic and phonological description, since it does not clearly separate the different meanings associated with more transparent designations such as 'central' or 'epenthetic vowels'.

Cwnlel Hammt & Rolind Notka The analysis of German schwa Camiel Hamans & Roland Noske 0. Introduction. In German, schwa poses some intriguing problems. These concern the schwa-zero alternations in inflexion. Working within the framework of lexical phonology, Wlese (1986a,b) argues that these alternations are syllabically conditioned. According to him, there is no need for the distinction between schwa constans and schwa mobile, as drawn up by Issatschenko (1974). Instead, he postulates that there are no underlying schwas at all, and postulates a specific lexical epenthesis rule, inserting a schwa before an unsyllabified consonant. However, the domain in which this rule applies has to be specified in an adhoc way: it applies on level 1 to verbs with a stem final liquid, on level 2 to nouns, adjectives with a stem final nasal, as well as bef ore an unsyllabified r^, and on level 3 to verbs with a stem final nasal, adjectives in general, and again before _r. We will, as Wie9e, account for the phenomena in question in the framework of lexical phonology. We will show however, that schwa insertion is a direct consequence of syllabification: empty nuclei created by syllabification are filled by the neutral vowel, schwa. Also, we will show that by assuming that schwa in German can be underlying as well as epenthetic, the observed difference between schwa constans and schwa mobile can be accounted for straightforwardly.