You are invited to  the Cognitive Science of Language lecture series organized by McMaster’s Department of Linguistics and Languages. The lecture will be delivered online (zoom link is below) by Dr. Lisa Davidson. Dr. Davidson is a professor and chair of the Linguistics Department at New York University. Her research is situated within laboratory phonology, with primary interests in voice quality, connected speech, and cross-language production and perception. One strand of her ongoing research has focused on glottalization as a linguistic element, including its phonemic, prosodic, and sociolinguistic uses. Her other current focus is on the phonetics of Hawaiian. Professor Davidson is also the co-general editor of the journal Laboratory Phonology. Please email lingdept@mcmaster.ca to request a link.

Title: How phonemic and non-phonemic glottals co-exist: evidence from Hawaiian

Abstract: While studies have examined the linguistic conditions that affect the implementation of phonemic glottal stops (e.g. DiCanio 2012, Malisz et al. 2013), there has been less focus on the phonetic implementation of phonemic and non-phonemic uses of glottalization within the same language. This study examines both phonemic and non-phonemic glottal elements in Hawaiian conversational speech to determine whether prosodic factors influence how these two types of glottal elements are employed within the same language. Phonemic glottal stops were only produced as a full glottal closure 7% of the time. Creaky realizations are more extensive when there are identical flanking vowels (e.g. /ho?okahi/ ‘one), and they begin earlier in the [V?V] sequence when the /?/ is in word-initial position (e.g., /ka#?ulu/ ‘the breadfruit’). A prosodic analysis shows that full closures were more likely in prosodic word-initial position (e.g. {ki:}{?a.ha} ‘cup’). For non-phonemic glottalization at word boundaries, the main factor conditioning the presence of a glottal element was being followed by single-vowel grammatical markers (e.g. [nui#o] ‘big POSS’).

For the phonemic glottal stop, a full closure may help indicate prosodic word boundaries, which could resolve cases where stress assignment does not disambiguate possible parses, e.g., {(ho:)}{?o.(a.ka)} or {(ho:.?o)}{(a.ka)}, ‘to open’. The preponderance of non-phonemic cases in the content word+single vowel grammatical marker environment may be to ensure that a critical single-vowel grammatical marker is not perceptually subsumed by the preceding vowel. Moreover, non-phonemic glottalization most often occurs where a content word that might begin with a phonemic glottal stop would not be expected, which may allow for both types of glottal elements to co-exist in the language without perceptual confusion or segmentation difficulties.
(joint work with ‘?iwi Parker Jones)