Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing

CHAPTER 6

Suprasegmental Timing

 

6.1 Introduction

This chapter examines the timing of vowel-consonant sequences in Bernese, Levantine, Hungarian and Madurese, in the context of both sequence duration and relative timing relations within sequences. The results reported here therefore bring together the data for closure duration and preceding vowel duration presented for Bernese in Chapter 3, and for the other three languages in Chapter 5.

Sequence duration will be considered in light of the dichotomy proposed in the literature between mora- and syllable-timed languages. I attempt to classify the four languages along these lines. As discussed in Chapter 1, mora-timed languages allot roughly equal amounts of time to moras, such that surface timing ...