Re: Status of Italian rising

At 9:57 PM -0800 12/8/02, Josh Brandt-Young wrote:
>Incidentally, your subject looks like a headline from a newspaper: "Status
>of [the] Italian [language is] rising [in popularity]!" :)
>
>Quoth Mangiat:
>
>> I can't figure out why linguists tend to describe both the components of
>> falling diphthongs as vocoids (with high /i/ and /u/ lacking sillabicity),
>> while only the second element of rising diphthongs is hold as a vocoid and
>> the first one is described as an approximant (a contoid).
>
><rant>
>This whole method of describing diphthongs (or even vowels in general)
>irritates me just a bit from a phonetic perspective, because it's at best
>not really descriptive of what's going on, and at worst relentlessly
>inaccurate. If I look at a spectrogram of the vowel [i], for instance, I see
>F1 and F2 (first and second formants) at a steady state through the duration
>of the vowel. For the English diphthong commonly transcribed [AI], though,
>there is no steady state at any point: the formants move smoothly throughout
>the production of the diphthong, starting at [A] and ending at [I], but not
>actually sitting at either of them. In the case of this particular sound,
>the duration of formant values *resembling* [A] is probably longer than
>those of [I], for which reason I suppose it's termed a "falling" diphthong,
>but really this terminology is a bit meaningless. What can it really mean
>for a vowel to be "non-syllabic?" Anyway, moving on to your actual
>issue...:)
></rant>
Caution should be exercised when interpreting spectrographic data. Just because
something seems perfectly obvious on a spectrogram doesn't mean that speakers
will find it to be significant, and what speakers find to be significant may
not show up at all. Case in point: In Shoshoni, intervocalic /s/ is typically
around 250 ms in duration. That's pretty long, and most linguists would be
happy calling it a geminate or long consonant. However, speakers of the
language don't see it that way; for them, it's *not* a long consonant (and they
know long consonants, since Shoshoni has grammatically controlled gemination).
My repeated attempts to elicit this response (i.e., "/s/ is a long consonant.")
from one of my consultants resulted in some amount of annoyance and
frustration. He just didn't consider /s/ to be long in spite of the fact that
it is measurably as long as any geminate in the language.

Likewise, the common distinction made between rising and falling diphthongs may be at
odds with the spectrographic data. One way we do know that there is such a
distinction in English is to look at how they pattern. With respect to stress
assignment and syllable structure, falling diphthongs pattern with tense vowels
while rising diphthongs pattern with lax vowels.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson

Reply