Tobias Scheer Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS

1. Voice-induced vowel lengthening Scheer, Tobias. 2017. Voice-induced vowel lengthening. Papers in Historical Phonology 2: 116-151. Available at http://journals.ed.ac.uk/pihph/issue/view/150. 47th Poznań Linguistc Meeting Session Beyond VOT – searching for realism in laryngealphonology Poznań, 18-20 September 2017 Tobias Scheer Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS

2. spontaneous vs. non-spontaneousvoicing obstruents: non-spontaeousvoicing– phonologically active sonorants, vowels: spontaneousvoicing – phonologically inactive Chomsky & Halle (1968: 300f) • solid and consensualempirical record • for example, sonorants and vowels do not participate in final devoicing

3. spontaneous vs. non-spontaneousvoicing • documented transmission of voicingfromvowels/sonorants to voicelessobstruents and vowels • intervocalicvoicing • Cracow-Poznań voicing (externalsandhi) • ja[g] możesz ‘how can you’ • voice-inducedvowellengthening Verycommonphenomena externalsandhivoicing Polish Bethin(1984, 1992), Gussmann (1992), Rubach (1996), Cyran (2011, 2012, 2014) Catalan Wheeler (1986), Bermúdez-Otero (2006) West Flemish De Schutter & Taeldeman(1986) Breton Krämer (2000) Durham English Gussenhoven& Jacobs (2011: 196)

4. how to go about voice transmission fromsonorants / vowels • option 1: • follow the surface • all alternations involvingsound are phonological in kind • sure sonorants and vowels do not have phonologically active voicing, exceptwhenthey do. [sonorantvoice] • Rice & Avery (1989), Piggott (1992), Rice (1993), Avery & Idsardi (2001) and Clements & Osu (2002: 338). Overview: Botma(2011). • option 2: • believe in yourtheory • thereissomethingbeyondphonology • sonorants and vowels never bear a phonological specification for voicing, and their voicing is never taken into account by phonological computation. Transmission of laryngeal properties to obstruents occurs post-phonologically, i.e. in the phonetics. • Cyran (2011, 2012, 2014), Scheer (2015a,b)

5. voice-inducedvowellengthening • verycommon • English, French, German (strongverbs), Russian, Korean etc. • possibly a phoneticuniversal: Delattre (1962), Chen (1970) • mechanical consequence of speech production • sometimesgrammaticalized (contrastive) • Overview: Maddieson (1996, 164ff, 1999). • Belasco(1953, 1958), Hoffman (1958), Zimmermann & Sapon (1958), Delattre (1962), Hogan & Rozsypal (1980), Luce & Luce (1985), Kluender (1988), van Santen (1992).

6. Slavic "compensatory" vowel lengthening • Origin • when word-final yers were lost, languages in the Western area of the Slavic territory lengthened the preceding vowel. • Western Slavic (save Lower Sorbian) plus westernmost languages of South Slavic (Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian). • geographic extension and possible restrictions to a subset of vowels • Bethin(1998, 96ff), Timberlake (1983a,b), Kavitskaya (2002, 119ff), Shevelov (1964, 447f), Carlton (1991, 215ff), Vondrák (1924, 309-320), Rospond (1979, 65ff), Stieber (1973, §§38-43), Sanders (2003, 57ff)

7. Slavic "compensatory" vowel lengthening

8. Slavic "compensatory" vowel lengthening • Properties • traditionally described as compensatory lengthening (compensating for the loss of the yer), but could as well be lengthening before word-final consonants. Carlton (1991: 217-219) and Sanders (2003: 60f) discuss reasons to doubt the compensatory causality for Western Slavic. • In all languages where it occurs lengthening is irregular, covering only an unpredictable subset of the words that offer the triggering context. • Sometimes also words that should not undergo the process do display lengthening. • This is true for all diachronic stages of the languages at hand, including the oldest record available. • Given its geographical extent, lengthening is assumed to have occurred in late Common Slavic (CS).

9. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • in Western Slavic, lengthening only occurs before sonorants and voiced obstruents. • whatever the original trigger of the lengthening, Stieber (1973: §41) demonstrates that in 15th century Polish there was an active process that lengthened vowels before word-final voiced consonants: loans that were present then (but absent when yers were lost long before the 15th century) appear with a lengthened vowel: • Adaam ‘Adam’ • staal ‘steel’ • captuur ‘hood’ • qhaan (modern spelling: chaan) ‘khan’.

10. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • o > oo / __C+voice # • where C+voice = sonorants and voiced obstruents here and below data are restricted to the vowel o, which of all vowels is most inclined to undergo lengthening. The situation of this vowel is also easier to assess since (like e) it was always short in CS. Hence long o in post-CS languages can only be the result of lengthening: there is no original long oo, which would have occurred before any consonant.

11. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents

12. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • Old Czech, exceptions • environment met but no alternation: roh – roh-u (non-alternating roots) • overgeneralization of the long vowel to forms where it is not final: Nsghróz‑a, stvór‑a, mór‑a, smól‑a • Gplhróz, stvór, mór, smól • environment not met but alternation occurs: póst - post-u "fasting Nsg, Gsg" (> mod. Cz. půst – půst-u).

13. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • Old Polish: more of the same • Lengthening • before voiced obstruents: • bóg, bób, róg, nóż, wóz, miód, wróg, chłód, gród, żłób • before sonorants • dół, stół, sól, dwór, mój, król, tchórz • Old Czechroh - roh u, bob - bob-u should lengthen but do not, while in Old Polish they do: róg– rog-u, bób– bob-u. • Old Polish dom– dom-u should lengthen but does not, while Old Czech displays regular dóm– dom-u.

14. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • Plus analogical activity both ways • eliminating rightful alternations • OCzvod‑a ‑ vód "water Nsg, Gpl" > MCzvod‑a - vod • creating illegitimate alternations • sobot-a -sobót "Saturday Nsg, Gpl" • powrót - powrot-u "return Nsg, Gsg"

15. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • hence the modern situation is hopeless: alternations are entirely unpredictable and lexicalized • The modern situation with all its ins and outs is described by Bethin (1979: 253f, 259), Gussmann (1980: 53f, 113ff, 2007 : 261ff), Szpyra (1989: 160ff, 1992: 288ff) and Grzegorczykowa (1999: 114ff) for Polish and by Trávníček (1951: §12) for Czech. • in addition, Polish has lost distinctive vowel length • ==> alternations are only visible when associated to vowel quality: • nóż[nuʃ] - noż‑a [nɔʒa] • ząb [zɔmp] - zęb-u [zɛmbu]

16. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • Interpretation • in both languages final devoicing has obliterated the surface trigger: final voiced obstruents are no longer voiced on the surface. Hence a phonetic account based on surface voicing is out of the question. • It is also ruled out since in the modern languages the alternation involves a category change: o and u/uu are different phonemes (unlike the original short-long distinction). • Category changes in the modern languages can thus only be due to phonological patterning. • But even in Old Czech and Old Polish, the unpredictable lexical idiosyncrasy strongly suggests that the alternation was always lexicalized, from day one.

17. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • Analysis • a process like • o > oo / __R,D # • was never carried out by phonological computation at any stage of any Slavic language (or of Common Slavic). • it could not be a phonological process because sonorant voicing has no phonological existence. • Rather, phonetic length was phonologized through a modification of the lexical entry (restructuring): • 1. /bog/  [boog] phonetic lengthening • 2. /boog/  [boog] phonetic length lexicalized • 3. /boog/  [book] final devoicing • 4. /boog/  [buuk] raising

18. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • Synchronic alternations in inflectional paradigms (in the old and modern languages) are managed by allomorphy: there is no common underlier: • 1. /buug/ selected in Nsg (and Asg for non-animates) • 2. /bog/ selected elsewhere • synchronic alternations involve a change of category (between two phonemes), hence could not be phonetic in kind.

19. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • in order for this analysis to work, phonetics must be able to specifically lengthen vowels before word-final voiced obstruents and sonorants (but not anywhere else). • a process conditioned by a word boundary looks phonological... • in English, Vxin CVxC# is significantly longer in duration than it is in CVxCV# (Klatt 1973) • CVC beat, stoop, glide, room • vs. CVCV(C) beaten, stupid, gliding, rumour • for each given consonant Cx, the preceding vowel in CVCx# was significantly longer than in CVCxV(C). • the difference in duration between vowels followed by word-final and internal consonants is significantly higher when the consonant is a sonorant or a voiced obstruent, as compared to voiceless obstruents.

20. Western Slavic vowel lengthening before sonorants and voiced obstruents • we are thus facing a lexically specific phonologization of a phonetic property. How is it decided which lexical items are concerned? • maybe token frequency: lengthened items belong to basic vocabulary (Czech): • lengthened: God, knife, table, house, ox, court • not lengthened: angle, bell, hunt, metal, haystack

21. Zoom out: the cross-linguistic picture • If voice-induced lengthening is phonetic in kind, the following prediction is made: • a pattern where this process is triggered by voiced obstruents, but not by sonorants, cannot exist. • because the distinction can only be made in the phonology. • there does not seem to be any case on record (in the massive documentation of voice-induced lengthening) where • lengthening is induced by obstruents • but not by sonorants

22. Zoom out: the cross-linguistic picture • this is unexpected for those who believe that voice-induced lengthening is phonological in kind: • the trivial and common pattern should be the one where only voiced obstruents are triggers, since only these have a voicing prime. • if the phenomenon is phonological in kind, another prediction is made: only [voice] languages should qualify. • this is wrong: aspiration (e.g. German, English) as much as voice languages (French) display voice-induced lengthening. • and the phenomenon may be universal anyway.

23. Zoom out: the cross-linguistic picture contrast with external sandhi voicing: only phonetic phonetic phonological Warsaw Cracow-Poznań

24. Zoom out: the cross-linguistic picture lengthening caused by sonorants and voiced obstruents or shortening caused by voiceless obstruents (pre-fortis clipping) ? if phonological in kind we are necessarily facing two distinct phenomena: lengthening in voice languages, shortening in aspiration languages if phonetic in kind there are no grounds for shortening: voicing is known to leak, but voicelessness is not. FAUX: tXouble etc.

25. Zoom out: the cross-linguistic picture • Canadian raising • conditions: • 1. tautomorphematicity of the diphthong and the following C • 2. diphthong stressed (cíte vs. citátion) • same analysis as for Western Slavic raising: phonetic modification of the vowel: offglide peripheralization (Thomas 2000, Moreton & Thomas 2007). write /rɑɪt/ [rɑit] vs. ride /rɑɪd/ [rɑɪd] 2. lexicalization of the result write /rɑit/ [rɑit] vs. ride /rɑɪd/ [rɑɪd] 3. raising through phonological computation: /ɑi/ → /ʌi/ if stressed write /rɑit/ [rʌit] vs. ride /rɑɪd/ [rɑɪd]

26. thank you for your attention