Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Department/Program/Center
World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
Abstract
This paper gives a detailed description of the consonant system of Campidanese Sardinian and makes methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of lenition. The data are drawn from a corpus of field recordings, including roughly 400 utterances produced by 15 speakers from the Trexenta and Western Campidanese areas. Campidanese has a complex lenition system that interacts with length, voicing, and manner contrasts. We show that the semi-automated lenition analysis presented in this journal by Ennever, Meakins, and Round can be fruitfully extended to our corpus, despite its much more heterogeneous set of materials in a genetically distant language. Intensity measurements from this method do not differ qualitatively from more traditional ones in their ability to detect lenition-fortition patterns, but do differ in interactions with stress. Lenition-fortition patterns reveal at least three levels of prosodic constituent in Campidanese, each of which is associated with medial lenition and initial fortition. Lenition affects all consonants and V-V transitions. It reduces duration, increases intensity, and probabilistically affects qualitative manner and voicing features in obstruents. Mediation analysis using regression modeling suggests that some intensity and most qualitative reflexes of lenition are explained by changes in duration, but not vice versa.
Digital Commons Citation
Katz, Jonah and Pitzanti, Gianmarco, "The Phonetics and Phonology of Lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian Case Study" (2019). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 1692.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/1692
Source Citation
Katz, J., & Pitzanti, G. (2019). The phonetics and phonology of lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian case study. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 10(1), 16. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.184
Comments
© 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.