Author:
Barry William,Andreeva Bistra
Abstract
Quasi-spontaneous dialogues from six languages which, according to recent discussion of rhythmic types, belong to three rhythmic groups – Russian and Bulgarian as ‘stress-timed’, Italian and Greek as ‘syllable-timed’ and Polish and Czech as an intermediate ‘mixed’ type – were examined for the following segmental reduction phenomena: reduction of consonant clusters, weakening of consonant articulation, residual properties from elided consonants in the original context segments, phonetic schwa-isation and syllable elision. The hypothesis tested was that there are comparable reduction phenomena in all languages since all languages allow for variation in the time and effort invested in any given part of an utterance as a means to support the relative weight of elements within the information structure. This hypothesis was borne out in principle, though there were a small number of exceptions across the six languages to the occurrence of reduction types examined.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Speech and Hearing,Linguistics and Language,Anthropology,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
31 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献