Vowel insertion in Scottish Gaelic

Scottish Gaelic has been cited as providing an instance of vowel excrescence (Hall 2006). One of the defining properties of excrescent vowels is that they are phonologically inert and are not motivated by – nor do they contribute to – the syllable structure of a language. In this paper, we report on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Phonology 2014-05, Vol.31 (1), p.123-153
Main Authors: Hammond, Michael, Warner, Natasha, Davis, Andréa, Carnie, Andrew, Archangeli, Diana, Fisher, Muriel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Consonants
Dialects
Language Patterns
Linguistics
Native languages
Orthographies
Phonemes
Phonetics
Phonology
Pronunciation
Scottish Gaelic
Suprasegmentals
Syllabification
Syllable structure
Syllables
Vowels
Words
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Summary:Scottish Gaelic has been cited as providing an instance of vowel excrescence (Hall 2006). One of the defining properties of excrescent vowels is that they are phonologically inert and are not motivated by – nor do they contribute to – the syllable structure of a language. In this paper, we report on a series of experiments which tap into native speakers' intuitions of syllable structure in Scottish Gaelic. Insofar as intuitions about syllable count and syllabification reflect phonological structure, our results suggest that the relevant vowels of Scottish Gaelic are not phonologically inert, and contribute directly to native speaker intuitions involving the number of syllables and the affiliation of consonants to those syllables. However, our results also establish that the relevant vowels have an intermediate phonological status, which also distinguishes them from underlying vowels.
ISSN:0952-6757
1469-8188
DOI:10.1017/S0952675714000050