Subject: phonology / phonetics

casali , roderic f . ; resolving hiatus ; 0-8153 - 3149 - 5 , cloth ; pages , $ 59 ; garland publishing ; outstanding dissertations in linguistics this study investigates two alternative ways in which languages resolve sequences of adjacent vowels ( hiatus ) : deletion of one of the vowels , or coalescence of the adjacent vowels to form a third vowel that combines features of both the originals . although existing phonological theories predict relatively few restrictions on the behavior of either process , a survey of 92 languages reveals a number of surprising and previously unreported limitations on their behavior . for example , although deletion of the first of two vowels is extremely common and can apply in any position , deletion of the second vowel is restricted to certain well-defined morpho-syntactic contexts , such as the boundary between a root and a suffix . these restrictions , are explained in terms of functionally-motivated constraints that favor preservation of phonological material in certain prominent positions , such as in root morphemes . in the case of coalescence , the study reveals a surprising correlation between the structure of a language 's vowel inventory and the result of merging high and a non-high vowels . this correlation is explained in terms of a novel theory of acoustic height features whose detailed specification is determined by functionally-motivated constraints sensitive to the number of vowel heights within a particular language . e - mail : info @ garland . com
