Florian Breit (UCL) - 2014-15 Students
florian.breit.12@ucl.ac.uk

Stress and Quantity in Modern Welsh

Even though Welsh appears to have a right-to-left syllabic trochee meter (cf. Hayes 1995) on the surface, there are facts that speak for a quantity-sensitive moraic trochee analysis, and both analyses seem to stand in contrast with no satisfactory analysis being available to-date. Issues are complicated further by restrictions on vowel-length and gemination, which appear to exhibit strict complementarity (Wood 1988) but where it is not clear at all what the determining factors for vowel-length or gemination are, especially in cases where both VːC and VCː are acceptable for the same C (cf. Hannahs 2013). This research seeks to answer the question what role quantity and gemination play in the Welsh phonological system, including its interplay with stress, by experimentally investigating the facts and developing a phonological analysis of the Welsh system in the framework of Government Phonology.