Speaker: Maria Giavazzi (DEC, ENS)
Title: Stress-conditioning from diachrony to synchrony: The case study of velar palatalization
Time: Monday, April 24th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Prosodically prominent positions within the word are privileged, manifesting the positional maintenance of contrasts otherwise neutralized and the resistance to processes applying elsewhere (a.o. Beckman, 1998; Giavazzi, 2010, González 2013). These positions are also the preferred target for a small class of frequent processes, e.g., consonants are often lengthened in pre-tonic and post-tonic position (Lavoie 2001, Smith 2002). In this talk I will focus on a case study of such a stress-conditioned process, velar palatalization in Italian (Giavazzi, 2010). First, I will present results of a study investigating the distribution of this process in early Italian. The application of palatalization in Early Italian was much more variable than in the contemporary language, though stress-conditioning was already observable (contra Faraoni, 2021). Second I will present articulatory data from an ongoing EMA study, which investigates the effect of lexical stress on the production of adjacent [ki] sequences. I will discuss the implications of these results for the μ–gesture model (Saltzmann, 2008; Katsika & Tsai, 2021) and for the diachronic emergence of stress-conditioning. Finally, I present a study investigating the perceptual consequences of prosodic enhancement on the discrimination of consonantal contrast.