Glottal stop insertion in Scottish Gaelic and contrastive syllabification

April 19, 2013

Teangeolaíocht na Gaeilge / Cànanachas na Gàidhlig / The Linguistics of the Gaelic Languages XV. University College Dublin, Dublin, Republic of Ireland

 download handout

The file is open to annotations via Hypothes.is. Comments are always welcome!

Categories:  Prosody Scottish Gaelic

 Share on Twitter

Gaelic dialects, mostly in Argyll, show a process of glottal stop epenthesis in stressed light syllables. This has been analysed as a stress-to-weight effect, and I review the evidence to show that this analysis is likely correct, and also that glottal stop insertion is a live phonological process rather than a lexicalized artefact of history. If this is correct, Argyll Gaelic shows an example of lexical storage of syllable structure, sometimes argued to be impossible.



About me

I’m Pavel Iosad, and I’m a Senior Lecturer in the department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. ¶ You can always go to the start page to learn more.

elsewhere

Updates

Subscribe to the  RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter at  @anghyflawn.

Search