Abstract

DANIS, Nick. Yorubá vowel deletion involves compensatory lengthening: Evidence from phonetics. SPiL plus (Online) [online]. 2020, vol.60, pp.1-12. ISSN 2224-3380.  http://dx.doi.org/10.5842/60-0-753.

A phonetic pilot study of Yorubá vowel deletion shows that the vowel that remains after an adjacent vowel deletes is slightly but significantly longer than a short vowel in non-deletional contexts (p < 0.001). In the configuration studied here, deletion occurs in the vowel of a CV verb when occurring before a V-initial direct object (/CVi +V2 / → [CV2]). However, instead of full vowel deletion as it is previously analysed (e.g. Akinlabi and Oyebade 1987, Ola Orie and Pulleyblank 2002), a compensatory lengthening analysis is proposed based on this new phonetic evidence. The experiment for this study controlled for inherent vowel duration, voicing, and manner of articulation of the surrounding consonants. These results are in line with a similar result regarding Yorubá tone (Ajibóyè et al. 2011) in the same syntactic (verb + direct object) configuration.

Keywords : phonology; Yorubá; deletion; compensatory lengthening; vowel duration.

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