황보영식. /r/과 CiV-긴장모음화.

Hwangbo, Young-Shik. 2020. /r/ and CiV-Tensing. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 26.3. 567-593. This paper aims to analyze the distribution of tense (or lax) vowels before CiV sequences that trigger CiV-Tensing, which tenses nonhigh vowels (e.g., mel[ə]dy ~ mel[oʊ]dious). For this purpose, words containing a CiV sequence were collected from The Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict). The target (orthographic) vowels as well as the pronunciation, tenseness, and stress of these vowels were extracted for the collected words. In addition, the token frequency of use of each word was obtained from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for about half of the words collected. A Logistic Regression Analysis revealed that the stress and frequency of use do not contribute to the decision of tenseness on the target vowel of CiV-Tensing, and that the target vowel and the following consonant do contribute to the decision of the tenseness of the vowel. A series of detailed analyses shows that /r/ tends to prevent the vowel prior to it from being tensed, that the vowel <u>, which usually becomes tense in spite of its highness, is laxed when it comes before /r/, that <o> becomes tense and is pronounced as /oʊ/ almost all the time when it occurs before a CiV sequence (e.g., bin[oʊ]mial), and that even when it comes before /r/ it is not laxed differently from the behavior of <u>, but is instead pronounced as /ɔ:/, which is another tense vowel (e.g., advert[ɔ:]rial). All these /r/-related phenomena are accounted for by the notion of ‘ease of articulation’ or ‘Reduced Effort’ in the acoustic and auditory space. (Sungkyul University, Professor)

 

Keywords: CiV-Tensing, Prevocalic Tensing, ease of articulation, vowel centralization