Paul Pigott
Contact Info
- Office: Grad Room (SN-3063)
- Telephone: (709) 864-8131
- Fax: (709) 864-4000
- Email: pigott.paul@gmail.com
Co-Supervisors
- Dr. Doug Wharram
- Dr. Yvan Rose
Research Interests
- Inuktitut Language Studies.
Thesis Title
- Foot Binarity in Labrador Inuttut: Regulating Geminates in a Syllable-Timed Language.
Thesis Description
My thesis contributes to past research on an exceptionless phonological rule, Schneider's Law (SL), which prohibits syllable adjacent geminate consonants at the word level, causing the right most geminate of such sequences to degeminate (without any regard to intervening vowel length). The phenomenon is described in four Canadian dialets of Inuktitut with analyses in Collis (1970), Massenett (1986) Dreshner & Johns (1995).
My study analyzes field data obtained from Inuktitut consultants in four Labrador communities with preliminary findings that:
- SL is an exceptionless rule in the spontaneous speech of Labrador Inuktitut speakers.
- My acoustic analysis lends empirical support to arguments from Dresher & Johns (1995) that SL is not a metrical rule.
- The study language lacks a system of alternating stress; the phonetic correlates of prominence in the data appear to be discretionary, at the word level, and possibly used by the speakers for empahsis.
