Phonological vowel reduction in four Catalan varieties Dylan Herrick University of California, Santa Cruz E-mail: herrick@ling.ucsc.edu Figure (1) ABSTRACT (a) Central Catalan (b) Western Catalan Stressed Unstressed Stressed Unstressed To test predictions made by theories of phonological vowel reduction, we require quantitative data to verify and make more precise impressionistic descriptions. Catalan, with phonological vowel reduction in several regional varieties, provides an ideal case study. This paper offers a quantitative description of the stressed and corresponding unstressed vowels of female speakers representing four distinct regional varieties of Catalan – that of Berguedà (representative of Central Catalan – the standard variety), Lleida (Western Catalan), Girona (a northern variety), and Palma (Balearic Catalan). Target vowels appeared in nonsense words which were uttered within a carrier phrase. The formant values for F1-F3 are reported here and compared to impressionistic descriptions. (c) Girona Catalan (d) Balearic Catalan 1. INTRODUCTION Regional varieties of Catalan differ with respect to the makeup of their stressed and unstressed vowel inventories. Central Catalan allows seven vowels (/ /) in stressed position and three vowels (/ /) in unstressed position ([7], [8], [10]). The vowel inventories of the other varieties are shown in figure (1) which also indicates the mapping relationships between stressed and unstressed vowels (based on diagrams and descriptions in the work of Mascaró [7], [8], and Recasens [10]). schwa in Central and Girona Catalan? Or are there significant differences between [ ] which corresponds to stressed [ ] or [ ] compared with [ ] which corresponds to stressed [a]? In addition to descriptive questions such as these, this study serves as the initial building block for a larger research project ([4]) which aims to test for a correlation between vocalic inventory size and position of vowels within the vowel space (see also Adaptive Dispersion Theory [5], [6]). The remainder of this paper describes the methodology and results for a phonetic study of Catalan vowels designed to verify impressionistic descriptions and serve as a base for further inquiries into phonological vowel reduction. The Catalan varieties in figure (1) exhibit vowel reduction in the phonological sense – the number of phonemes found in unstressed position is reduced relative to the number of vowel phonemes found in stressed position. Phonology has no trouble describing vowel reduction, but it does have trouble explaining it. Recent phonological models which incorporate phonetic information directly into the theory (such as Dispersion Theory [3], [9] as well as work by Crosswhite [2] and Herrick [4]) have had greater explanatory success compared with previous theories. However, such phonetically based theories cannot be tested without quantitative phonetic data. Thus, the primary goal of this paper is to contribute quantitative data which can be used to help develop and test a more phonetically oriented theory of phonological vowel reduction. An additional interest is verifying the extent to which the quantitative data matches the phonological descriptions. How accurate are the mapping relationships shown in figure (1)? For example, do the unstressed versions of [ ] really converge on 2. METHODOLOGY For each of the different regional varieties studied, three native speakers were recorded uttering nonsense verbs containing the stressed (and corresponding unstressed) vowels of their variety. All recordings were made in Catalonia, all speakers were female college students, and a ‘native’ was defined as someone who spoke Catalan as their primary language and came from a family in which both parents spoke primarily Catalan. For the recordings, speakers were shown several verbs – one for each of the vowels allowed in stressed position in their variety (seven for Central and Western, six for Girona, and eight for Balearic Catalan), and they were asked to conjugate each 15th ICPhS Barcelona 1679 ISBN 1-876346-48-5 © 2003 UAB