Signs of trill in Modern Greek? Acoustic description of the Greek rhotic sound in coda position
Keywords:
rhotics, acoustic variability, coda position, Modern GreekAbstract
Cross-linguistically, rhotics show significant phonetic variability (Lindau 1985, Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). In the Greek literature, Modern Greek has only one rhotic sound which is typically described as an alveolar tap [ɾ], not only in intervocalic position but also in clusters (Arvaniti 1999, 2001; Nicolaidis 2001, Baltazani 2005). The main purpose of this article is to characterize acoustically the Greek rhotic sound in coda position. The phonetic characteristics of the Greek rhotic sound were examined in a corpus comprising of 600 tokens (4 native speakers of Modern Greek x 3 repetitions x 50 words). Our results indicate that the predominant acoustic manifestation of the rhotic in coda is a tap, while other realizations of the Greek rhotic are also possible, such as approximant, presenting frication or trill.
Cross-linguistically, rhotics show significant phonetic variability (Lindau 1985, Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). In the Greek literature, Modern Greek has only one rhotic sound which is typically described as an alveolar tap [ɾ], not only in intervocalic position but also in clusters (Arvaniti 1999, 2001; Nicolaidis 2001, Baltazani 2005). The main purpose of this article is to characterize acoustically the Greek rhotic sound in coda position. The phonetic characteristics of the Greek rhotic sound were examined in a corpus comprising of 600 tokens (4 native speakers of Modern Greek x 3 repetitions x 50 words). Our results indicate that the predominant acoustic manifestation of the rhotic in coda is a tap, while other realizations of the Greek rhotic are also possible, such as approximant, presenting frication or trill.
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