Final Vowel Loss in Lower Kasai Bantu (drc) as a Contact-Induced Change

Assimilation of Final Low Back Vowel in Eghlidian Dialect

In this article, the low back vowel /A/ in word-final positions in Eghlidian dialect, one of Persian dialects, is studied. This vowel is represented phonetically as [A], [o] and [@] in different phonetic environments. Therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. Since one of the authors of th...

Vowel reduction as information loss

Vowel reduction suppresses phonetic information in the speech signal and should be understood as having an analogous impact on phonological representations. Reduction follows two apparently contradictory routes in vowel space, yielding either centralised values (the ‘centripetal’ pattern) or the corner values a, i, u (the ‘centrifugal’ pattern). What unifies these vowels is the relative simplic...

ON THE COGNITIVE BASIS OF CONTACT-INDUCED SOUND CHANGE: VOWEL MERGER REVERSAL IN SHANGHAINESE YaoYao

This study investigates the source and status of a recent sound change in Shanghainese (Wu, Sinitic) that has been attributed to language contact with Mandarin. The change involves two vowels, /e/ and /ɛ/, reported to be merged three decades ago but produced distinctly in contemporary Shanghainese. Results of two production experiments show that speaker age, language mode (monolingual Shanghain...

Contact-induced typological change

1. Introduction. It is easy to show that contact-induced change can have a profound effect on the typological profile of the receiving language. Probably the most obvious examples , and also the ones that are easiest to find, are changes in basic sentential word order. These are especially striking because it is word order features that have attracted the most attention in the typological liter...

Auxiliary placement in Rangi: A case of contact-induced change?