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Metrical structure in Scottish Gaelic: tonal accent, glottalisation and overlength

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2019

Donald Alasdair Morrison
Donald Alasdair Morrison*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
*
E-mail: damoireasdan@outlook.com.
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Abstract

Scottish Gaelic displays a phonological contrast that is realised in different dialects by means of tonal accent, glottalisation or overlength. In line with existing analyses of similar oppositions in languages such as Swedish, Danish, Franconian and Estonian, I show that this contrast reflects a difference in metrical structure. Using the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory, I argue that this metrical contrast is derived, and results from faithfulness to foot structure that is built regularly at the stem level, but rendered opaque by subsequent phonological processes. Scottish Gaelic therefore represents an intermediate stage in the diachronic development of underlyingly contrastive metrical structure. This analysis successfully accounts for the complex properties of svarabhakti, a process of copy epenthesis that is intimately connected to the phonological contrast in question, and also sheds light upon the relationship between the oppositions of tonal accent, glottalisation and overlength found in various languages of northern Europe.

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Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 391 - 432
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero for many years of guidance, Pavel Iosad and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions, and audiences at the 26th Manchester Phonology Meeting, the 16th Annual Conference of the French Phonology Network, the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, the 16th Old World Conference on Phonology and Fonologi i Norden 2019 for helpful feedback. This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/J500094/1).

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