Although OE schwa has been viewed as an allophone, but not as a phoneme, the abstract schwa like the latter appears in the analysis of a phonological representation. The four pieces of evidence (posttonic weakening, derivation, distribution, and consonant lenition) converge to argue in favor of the underlying schwa of the syllabic consonants. The present discussion is, in terms of analyzing the...

Dutch words with certain final consonant clusters are subject to optional schwa epenthesis. The present research aimed at investigating how Dutch listeners deal with this type of phonological variation. By means of syllable monitoring experiments, it was investigated whether Dutch listeners process words with epenthetic schwa (e.g., ’balluk’) as bisyllabic words or rather as monosyllabic words....

Recent work in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993, to appear) has suggested that phonological regularities can be explained without reference to phonological rules, strictly in terms of constraints on representational wellformedness. A unique aspect of Optimality Theory (OT) is that candidates are evaluated in parallel: there is no serial derivation. Given th...

Ultrasound can be used to address unresolved questions in phonological theory. To date, some studies have shown that results from ultrasound imaging can shed light on how differences in phonological elements are implemented. Phenomena that have been investigated include transitional schwa, vowel coalescence, and transparent vowels. A study of consonant cluster phonotactics is presented as an ex...

We report on an investigation of inter-consonantal intervals (ICIs) in sequences of two, three and four stops within and across word boundaries in Tripolitanian Libyan Arabic (TLA). This variety of Arabic has been described as allowing vowel epenthesis in all consonant clusters [7]. Our investigation was motivated by the question of whether some of the ‘epenthetic vowels’ of TLA are better char...

This article examines the status of consonant cluster resulting after concatenation discontinuous plural morpheme ma…….∫. In disconformity with Benhallam’s Syllable structure Assignment Algorithm (henceforth SSAA) which predicts that every succession consonants is resolved in MA by inserting schwa to break hiatus, abovementioned morphological operation does not permit epenthesis. As such, it im...

Recent work in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993, to appear) has suggested that phonological regularities can be explained without reference to phonological rules, strictly in terms of constraints on representational wellformedness. A unique aspect of Optimality Theory (OT) is that candidates are evaluated in parallel: there is no serial derivation. Given th...

Dutch allows optional schwa insertion between a liquid and obstruent in words like film/filəm ("film") and dorp/dorəp ("village"), lengthening the word by one syllable. This epenthesis is productive and widespread, and is understood to be a phonological rather than phonetic process. A corpus analysis shows that a speaker's choice between the variant forms is influenced by probability: words tha...