VOWEL REDUCTION

1. (Phonology; Phonetics) Vowels in lexically unstressed position are reduced in languages such as German, Russian and English. Phonologically, reduction may lead to a complete neutralization of some vowel contrasts, e.g. in British and American English, only three vowel qualities contrast in unstressed syllables, whereas in stressed syllables, up to 19 vowels (Received Pronunciation) contrast (see e.g. Bolinger 1981). Phonetically, vowel reduction is a gradual process which results in a shrunken vowel space (Lindblom 1963). | Christine Mooshammer and Christian Geng, 2008
2. (Phonetics) Said to be a characteristic feature of languages with heavy stress, such as, for instance, English and Swedish. In these languages, stress is known to be positively correlated with vowel duration (Fry 1955, Hadding-Koch 1961, Lieberman 1960). In British as well as American varieties of English, there is a tendency for most vowels in weakly stressed syllables to approach schwa in quality. Anglo-Saxon phoneticians (Jones 1922/1956, Kenyon 1924/1961) sometimes refer to this phenomenon as gradation. The term implies that the obscuration of quality varies along a continuum of stronger and weaker forms, the precise amount of reduction being related to the degree of stress placed on the vowel. Stetson (1928/1951) observes that "in English it is possible to note a regular series of reduced 'values' of the vowel which ends in schwa. With the increase in rate all vowels in unstressed syllables arrive at the common schwa."
    Vowel reduction is associated with stress, rate of utterance, and contextual influence. | Björn Lindblom, 1963
3. (Phonetics) Any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word, and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.
    Vowels which have undergone vowel reduction may be called reduced or weak. In contrast, an unreduced vowel may be described as full or strong. The prototypical reduced vowel in English is schwa. In Australian English, that is the only reduced vowel, though other dialects have additional ones. | Wikipedia, 2025

VOWEL SPACE AREA

1. (Phonetics) Vowel Space Area (VSA) measures spectral dimensions of formant frequencies, which are comprised of the vowel height or first formant (F1) and the degree of "backness", of the tongue, or second formant (F2), (Fant 1973, Gimson/Cruttenden 1962/2008). | Arum Perwitasari, Marian Klamer, and Niels O. Schiller, 2016
2. (Examples)
    ○ This paper examines variation in vowel space area and its use in social meaning making. Among adolescents at a California high school, patterns of difference in vowel space correlate to social practices of exclusion in the partying scene, albeit alongside explicit discourses of high school social life as inclusive and fluid. I treat vowel space as a sociolinguistic sign, that is, a holistic semiotic resource at play in addition to (or in tandem with) individual segments. | Teresa Pratt, 2023
    ○ Vowel space measurements can provide objective information on formant distribution and act as a proxy for vowel production. There are a number of proposed ways to quantify vowel production clinically, including vowel space area, formant centralization ratio, and vowel articulation index. | Marja W. J. Caverlé and Adam P. Vogel, 2020
    ○ The effects of first language (L1) vowel systems in second language (L2) acquisition have been cross-linguistically assessed. In production tasks, if an L1 has a complex vowel system, the vowel space area in their speaking is predicted to be crowded (Flege 1995, 2003). Such crowded vowel space creates less room for a new vowel category and brings disadvantages in learning L2 vowels. This prediction, however, seems to be unresolved for an L1 vowel system with a small number of categories (Meunier et al. 2003). If an L1 has a small vowel system, the vowel space area may be less crowded as the L2 vowel sounds would easily adjust into the same L1 category (Iverson and Evans 2007). The current study seeks to contribute to this assumption by examining the vowel space area between two regional languages in Indonesia, namely, Javanese and Sundanese. So far, the vowel space area in L2 vowel production by native speakers of Javanese and Sundanese has never been well investigated. | Arum Perwitasari, Marian Klamer, and Niels O. Schiller, 2016

VOWEL SPREADING
(Examples)
 ○ To illustrate, take the metathesis of Uab Meto (Austronesian; Indonesia) /kokɪs-e/ → [ko͡ɪks-e] 'the bread'. Under metathesis, the [ɪ] vowel spreads across the intervening [k], overlapping it entirely. The core precedence relations among features are unchanged, because the offset of [ɪ] still follows all portions of [k]. If this were a VC sequence with no line-crossing, we would expect for the [ɪ] offset to precede the [k] offset. | Kate Mooney, 2023
 ○ In a number of languages the laryngeal consonants /ʔ, h/ are transparent to vowel spread. For instance, in Kashaya, vowels must be identical in morpheme-internal /VʔV/ and /VhV/ sequences.

Kashaya (Pomoan; USA) (Buckley 1994)
siʔi
heʔen
ʔaha
maʔa
'flesh'
'how'
'mouth'
'food; eat'
 
 
 
 
nihin
behe
ʔoho
yuhu
'to oneself'
'bay nut'
'fire, light'
'pinole'

VOWEL-TO-VOWEL COARTICULATION

1. (Phonetics; Phonology) A central goal of research in speech production has been the description and prediction of coarticulatory effects, defined as the articulatory or acoustic influence of one segment or phoneme on another, and resulting in the absence of a one-to-one mapping between phonemes and their output in production. One important type of evidence for this absence of one-to-one mapping is that coarticulatory effects extend from one vowel to another across one or more intervening consonants, a phenomenon referred to as vowel-to-vowel coarticulation.
    Acoustic data on vowel-to-vowel lingual coarticulation in VCV utterances have shown that the transitions into and out of the consonant are influenced by the quality of the transconsonantal vowel (Öhman 1966), presumably indicating tongue movement for the second vowel beginning before consonant closure and tongue movement for the first vowel continuing after consonant release. Palatographic data (Butcher and Weiher 1976) and physiological data (Perkell 1969, Kent 1972; Kent and Moll 1969/1972) have also shown this effect. More recently, studies on various languages have shown lingual vowel-to-vowel coarticulatory effects not only in transitions but extending into the steady-state period of the transconsonantal vowel both in palatographic data (German: Butcher and Weiher 1976, Catalan: Recasens 1984, 1987, Spanish: Recasens 1987) and in acoustic data (Bantu Languages: Manuel 1990, Japanese: Magen 1984, English: Fowler 1981, Magen 1985, Whalen 1990).
    While there is ample evidence of the existence of vowel-to-vowel coarticulatory effects, factors have been cited which affect the extent of these effects. For instance, these effects may be constrained by intervocalic palatals and velars, whose production requires use of the tongue body in conflict with the production of vowels, thereby restricting vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (Russian: Öhman 1966, Purcell 1979, German: Butcher and Weiher 1976, Catalan: Recasens 1984). Effects may also be limited by the phonological system of the language; less coarticulation is allowed when more, rather than fewer, vowels are fitted into a vowel space (Manuel and Krakow 1984, Manuel 1990). | Harriet S. Magen, 1997
2. (Examples)
    ○ The goal of this study is to examine how the degree of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation varies as a function of prosodic factors such as nuclear-pitch accent (accented vs. unaccented), level of prosodic boundary (Prosodic Word vs. Intermediate Phrase vs. Intonational Phrase), and position-in-prosodic-domain (initial vs. final). | Taehong Cho, 2004
    ○ Öhman (1966) has proposed a model to account for V-to-V coarticulation across bilabial, alveolar, and velar stops in VCV sequences. In this model, VCV coarticulatory effects are interpreted as reflecting an underlying V-to-V tongue movement with a superimposed consonantal constriction, which is actualized by commands directed towards different regions of the tongue. Öhman distinguishes at least three separate tongue regions that can be independently controlled: regions that shape the whole tongue body (used for the production of vowels), the apical region (used for the production of alveolars), and the dorsal region (used for the production of velars). Tongue regions left uncontrolled by these consonantal commands can conform to the underlying diphthongal gesture, thus allowing for V-to-V coarticulation. | Daniel Recasens, 1984

VP ELLIPSIS

1. (Syntax) Refers to the phenomenon whereby the main predicate of a clause—typically in combination with its internal arguments—is missing. Two representative examples:
   1. John is sleeping, and Bill is __ too.
   2. Shorty couldn't see Rihanna, but I could __.
   
    The second conjunct in these sentences is interpreted as 'Bill is sleeping too' and 'I could see Rihanna', respectively, even though the strings sleeping and see Rihanna are not overtly expressed. VPE has garnered the interest of generative syntacticians from the very early days and has dominated the research on ellipsis for several decades. Key publications include Sag (1976), Hankamer and Sag (1976), Williams (1977), Zagona (1982/1983), Hardt (1993), Fiengo and May (1994), Lobeck (1995), Kennedy (1994/2000), and Johnson (2001). | Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, 2014
2. (Syntax) The name given to instances of anaphora in which a missing predicate, like that marked by "Δ" in (1b), is able to find an antecedent in the surrounding discourse, as (1b) does in the bracketed material of (1a).
   1. a. Holly Golightly won't [ eat rutabagas ].
      b. I don't think Fred will Δ, either.
   
    We can identify three sub-problems which a complete account of this phenomenon must solve.
   1. In which syntactic environments is VP Ellipsis licensed?
   2. What structural relation may an elided VP and its antecedent have?
   3. How is the meaning of the ellipsis recovered from its antecedent?
   
    | Kyle Johnson, 2001
3. (Syntax) Typically involves non-pronunciation of the verb phrase. This phenomenon, which has already been widely discussed for English in the literature, is illustrated in (1). The second conjunct of this sentence is interpreted as '... and Peter was hassled by the police, too', but the verb phrase is omitted because there is a salient antecedent in the first conjunct that renders the verb phrase in the second conjunct recoverable for the hearer. (In fact, repetition of the full verb phrase often feels redundant.)
   1. Betsy was hassled by the police, and Peter was, too.
   
    | Lobke Aelbrecht and William Harwood, 2015
4. (Syntax) A constituent containing the main predicate of a clause can go unpronounced, as in Mary will leave before John will [ – ], when certain syntactic, semantic, and discourse conditions are met. This process has come to be known as VP Ellipsis (VPE), but this term is misleading: it implies that non-verbal predicates cannot be omitted in the same fashion (they can be), and that VP is the constituent undergoing the operation in question elsewhere (it isn't). | Craig William Turnbull-Sailor, 2014

VP RECYCLING HYPOTHESIS

1. (Syntax) Five acceptability judgment experiments supported a VP recycling hypothesis, which claims that when a syntactically-matching antecedent is not available, the listener/reader creates one using the materials at hand.
    We claim that the grammatical resolution of an elided verb phrase requires the presence of a syntactically parallel antecedent. However, in the absence of such an antecedent, the processor may recycle materials at hand and create a suitable syntactic structure (see Tanenhaus, Carlson, and Seidenberg 1985 for a similar hypothesis). We consider recycling to be a performance repair strategy for a structure that is, strictly speaking, ungrammatical. As such, it carries with it varying degrees of difficulty, and results in different levels of acceptability.
    According to the recycling hypothesis, the construction of a verb phrase antecedent depends on grammatical properties of the input and the recycling process follows paths that are made available by grammar. The acceptability of the outcome will depend on the steps needed to create a suitable antecedent. It should be relatively easy to create an antecedent if only one or a small number of grammatically defined operations must be performed on the actual verb phrase to create a verb phrase of the appropriate syntactic shape. If there is clear evidence concerning these operations or concerning the shape of the target verb phrase, then the recycling should be easy and the examples should be judged acceptable, at least relative to examples requiring more operations or examples where less evidence points to the need for these operations. On the other hand, if the processor does not have adequate material to work with in creating the target verb phrase antecedent, then the example should be relatively unacceptable. In particular, if the actual antecedent does not even contain the verb required to head the antecedent verb phrase, the creation of an appropriate verb phrase should be expected to fail and the example should be judged to be unacceptable.
    The VP-recycling hypothesis predicts that finding an antecedent should be easier if the antecedent of the verb phrase ellipsis has the canonical properties of a verb phrase, i.e., it looks like a verb phrase and it occupies a position (e.g., post-subject) that is characteristic of verb phrases. | Ana Arregui, Charles Clifton Jr, Lyn Frazier, and Keir Moulton, 2006
2. (Syntax) 
   1. a. None of the astronomers saw the comet, but John did.
      b. Seeing the comet was nearly impossible, but John did.
      c. The comet was nearly unseeable, but John did.
   
    Of the three sentences in (1), only (1a) is typically judged as fully grammatical, as supported by the results of Arregui et al.'s (2006) acceptability judgment study. The critical observation is that although both (1b) and (1c) are degraded, (1c) is noticeably worse. To handle gradience in ellipsis antecedent relations, Arregui et al. propose the VP Recycling Hypothesis, which suggests that in the absence of a syntactically matching antecedent the parser will attempt to "recycle" material from the actual input it received into a licit antecedent, but always with some penalty for not having true syntactic identity. The closer the input material is to a grammatical antecedent, the more successful the parser will be in recycling and the smaller the penalty will be. Thus, the embedded VP of (1b) is easier to accept than the negative adjective in (1c), because although neither structure is truly grammatical, the embedded VP example still contains a VP that can be easily turned into a legal antecedent. | Caroline Andrews, 2021
3. (Syntax) Arregui et al. (2006) take a similar approach, but they argue that the missing antecedent is syntactically reconstructed, instead of being accommodated. According to their VP recycling hypothesis, hearers apply syntactic derivation to the available linguistic material to construct a matching antecedent. | Robin Lemke, 2024

WAVEGRAM

1. (Phonetics) A method for analyzing and displaying electroglottographic (EGG) signals and their first derivative (DEGG) is introduced: the electroglottographic wavegram. To construct a wavegram, the time-varying fundamental frequency is measured and consecutive individual glottal cycles are identified. Each cycle is locally normalized in duration and amplitude, the signal values are encoded by color intensity, and the cycles are concatenated to display the entire voice sample in a single image, similar as in sound spectrography. The wavegram provides an intuitive means for quickly assessing vocal fold contact phenomena and their variation over time. Variations in vocal fold contact appear here as a sequence of events rather than single phenomena, taking place over a certain period of time, and changing with pitch, loudness and register. Multiple DEGG peaks are revealed in wavegrams to behave systematically, indicating subtle changes of vocal fold oscillatory regime. As such, EGG wavegrams promise to reveal more information on vocal fold contacting and de-contacting events than previous methods. | Christian T. Herbst, W. Tecumseh S. Fitch, and Jan G. Švec, 2010
2. (Phonetics) Recently, endoscopic high-speed laryngoscopy has been established for commercial use as a state-of-the-art technique to examine vocal fold kinematics. Since modern cameras provide sampling rates of several thousand frames per second, a high volume of data has to be considered for visual and objective analysis. A method for visualizing endoscopic high speed videos in three-dimensional cycle-based graphs combining and extending the approaches of phonovibrograms and electroglottographic wavegrams is presented. To build a phonovibrographic wavegram, individual cycles of a phonovibrogram are segmented, normalized in cycle duration, and concatenated over time. For analyzing purposes, the emerging three-dimensional scalar field is visualized with different rendering techniques providing information of different aspects of vocal fold kinematics. The phonovibrographic wavegram incorporates information about the glottal closure type, size, and location of the amplitudes, symmetry, periodicity, and phase information. The potential of the approach to visualize the characteristics of vocal fold vibration in a compact and intuitive way is demonstrated within two healthy and three pathologic subjects. The phonovibrographic wavegram allows a comprehensive analysis of vocal fold kinematics and reveals information that remains hidden with other visualization techniques. | Jakob Unger, Tobias Meyer, et al., 2013

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