Non-Intervocalic Geminates: Typology, Acoustics, Perceptibility

San Diego Linguistics Papers 4 (2013) 2-27 Non-Intervocalic Geminates: Typology, Acoustics, Perceptibility Bozena Pajak University of California, San Diego * Introduction Geminate consonants in different contexts (defined in terms of word position and adjacent segments) are not evenly distributed cross-linguistically. Intervocalic geminates are the most common (Thurgood 1993) and non-vowel-adjacent geminates are the most rare (Thurgood 1993, Muller 2001). This paper provides experimental evidence that this typological pattern has some basis in perception: the geminate-singleton contrast is easiest to perceive in the intervocalic context and hardest in the non-vowel-adjacent environment. Phonetically, geminates are usually described as long consonants, but their relative duration with respect to their singleton counterparts differs from language to language. Based on a cross- linguistic survey, Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) report that in careful speech geminates can be on average between one-and-a-half and three times as long as singletons. 1 Many languages use consonant length contrastively, as illustrated by minimal pairs such as ‘bello’ – ‘belo’ (‘beautiful’ – ‘I bleat’) from Italian, or ‘takka’ – ‘taka-’ (‘fireplace’ – ‘back’) from Finnish. 2 Listeners are usually assumed to rely on a variety of cues in addition to duration, such as differences in burst, voice onset time (VOT), amplitude, etc. (Lahiri & Hankamer 1988, Ambramson 1986, Ambramson 1992, Ambramson 1999, Arvaniti 1999, 2010, Muller 2001). Phonologically, geminates have been represented, for example, as consonants that have two timing slots (e.g., Levin 1985, Selkirk 1991, Tranel 1991, Hume, Muller, & Engelenhoven 1997), a single mora projection (e.g., Hyman 1985, Hayes 1989, Davis 1999), or a combination of the two (Muller 2001). Additionally, it has been argued that geminates in different word positions may have distinct representations, even within the same language (Goodman 1995, Davis 1999, Ham 2001, Topintzi 2006, Topintzi 2008). Finally, geminates that arise through morpheme concatenation have often been referred to as ‘fake’ geminates, and represented as two adjacent identical segments (Kenstowicz 1982, Hayes 1986). For the purposes of this paper, no explicit position is taken with respect to the phonological representations of geminates. All geminates are discussed regardless of their representation. Geminates can be classified by taking into account their context, which is defined here in terms of their word position and adjacent segments. The importance of these two factors in analyses of geminate consonants has been pointed out by Muller (1999), McCrary (2002, 2004), and Pajak (2009). Muller argues that distinct constraints target geminates in different word positions in Present affiliation: University of Rochester, Center for Language Sciences, email: bpajak@bcs.rochester. edu. 1 Longer duration might not be a universal characteristic of geminates. Bothorel (1999, as reported by Thurgood 1993) states that in Breton (Argol) the total duration of geminates and their singleton counterparts is approximately the same, but geminates display a longer steady state, which gives the impression of higher intensity. However, it seems fairly controversial whether such consonants can in fact be considered geminates. Examples from on-line dictionaries: http://www.wordreference. com/iten (Italian) and http://www.fincd. com (Finnish).