Vowel reduction is conditioned by quality and quantity interactions: Evidence from Bolognese

Abstract

This study presents the first formal analysis of vowel reduction in Bolognese, a Gallo-Italic language spoken in Bologna, Italy. While vowel reduction in many languages is predictable from place features alone, Bolognese shows length-sensitive asymmetries: front-mid vowels reduce differently depending on whether they are underlyingly short or long. I propose a sonority-based analysis in Optimality Theory, where both vowel height and length contribute to a vowel’s total sonority. Sonority is then evaluated by a new faithfulness constraint, Maintain(sonority), which penalizes changes of sonority on input-output correspondence. In the analysis, vowels above a certain sonority threshold reduce to [a], while those below reduce to [i], illustrating how grammars can demonstrate sensitivity to multiple independent contributors of sonority, and how pressures to reduce sonority and maximize contrast can interact to determine vowel reduction.