Prominence and Gemination in Ingrian

Prominence and gemination in Ingrian

This paper reports results of an acoustic study of stress and length patterns in Ingrian, a Finnic language closely related to Finnish. Primary stressed syllables were found to have higher fundamental frequency than both secondary stressed and unstressed syllables. Intensity and duration played a limited role in signaling stress. In keeping with published descriptions, consonants preceding a lo...

Gemination in Hungarian loanword adaptation

An interesting puzzle of Hungarian phonology is gemination in recent loanwords borrowed from English, German (and occasionally, from French). A consonant following a short stressed vowel is often geminated in the loanword, even if the consonant doubling does not have an orthographic reflex in the source word, i.e. the consonant in question is not spelt as a double letter in the source word. Unl...

Gemination and anti-gemination: Meinhof 's law in LuGanda and Kikuyu

Consonant Gemination in Japanese Loanword Phonology

The distribution of geminate obstruents in Japanese loanwords appears very complex. Some consonants are more prone to gemination than others, on the one hand, and one and the same consonant is more likely to geminate in some phonological contexts than in others, on the other hand. This paper tackles these problems by considering the relationship between consonant gemination in native words and ...

Relative Importance in English and Persian: Thematization or Tonic Prominence?

There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. The former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (Halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. This study explores how relative importance is realized in English and Persian. It also investigates how advanced Persian learne...