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Typological implications of Kalam predictable vowels*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2010

Juliette Blevins  and
Andrew Pawley
Juliette Blevins
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Andrew Pawley
Affiliation:
Australian National University
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Abstract

Kalam is a Trans New Guinea language of Papua New Guinea. Kalam has two distinct vowel types: full vowels /a e o/, which are of relatively long duration and stressed, and reduced central vowels, which are shorter and often unstressed, and occur predictably within word-internal consonant clusters and in monoconsonantal utterances. The predictable nature of the reduced vowels has led earlier researchers, e.g. Biggs (1963) and Pawley (1966), to suggest that they are a non-phonemic ‘consonant release’ feature, leading to lexical representations with long consonant strings and vowelless words. Here we compare Kalam to other languages with similar sound patterns and assess the implications for phonological theory in the context of Hall's (2006) typology of inserted vowels. We suggest that future work on predictable vowels should explore the extent to which clusters of properties are explained by evolutionary pathways.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , May 2010 , pp. 1 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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