The Phonology of Welsh
S. J. Hannahs
Abstract
The Phonology of Welsh is an exploration of the phonology of modern Welsh. Starting with an overview of the phonetics and segment inventories of Welsh, the book then examines the phonological structures of the language, including syllables, feet, phonotactics and stress. Having established the basic phonetic inventories and phonological structures of the language, the book moves on to the analysis of phonological alternations such as ‘vowel mutation’ and assimilation, analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory. The analysis then considers the importance of the phonological ... More
The Phonology of Welsh is an exploration of the phonology of modern Welsh. Starting with an overview of the phonetics and segment inventories of Welsh, the book then examines the phonological structures of the language, including syllables, feet, phonotactics and stress. Having established the basic phonetic inventories and phonological structures of the language, the book moves on to the analysis of phonological alternations such as ‘vowel mutation’ and assimilation, analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory. The analysis then considers the importance of the phonological foot, accounting for a number of foot-based phenomena such as sonority sequencing resolutions, the behaviour of /h/, and antepenultimate deletion – the variable deletion of the initial syllable of certain trisyllabic words. The book also examines initial consonant mutation, the variation in initial consonants of wordforms characteristic of the Celtic languages. Finally, the last chapter points out directions for further research in Welsh phonology. Taken as a whole, the book aims to present a theoretically coherent account of the sound patterns of modern Welsh as a whole, thus filling a gap in the available literature on the language.
Keywords:
Welsh,
Welsh phonology,
vowel mutation,
consonant mutation,
sonority sequencing,
Welsh feet,
Celtic phonology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199601233 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199601233.001.0001 |
