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Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistics Theory, Vol 7, No 1 (2019)

This study examined three vocalic phenomena in Kozani Greek, unstressed high-vowel deletion, unstressed mid-vowel raising, and stressed mid-vowel diphthongization. Eight dialectal speakers were recorded conversing freely with a native speaker of the dialect. The results showed that high vowel deletion and mid vowel raising occurred frequently (but not always) in the corpus and were not restricted to word-final position. Stressed mid vowel diphthongization was rare. Acoustic measurements of first and second formant frequencies (F1-F2) showed that raised mid vowels /e/ and /o/ were very similar to /i/ and /u/ respectively and diphthongized /e/ and /o/ had the characteristic for diphthongs F1-F2 formant movement. Overall, the application of such vocalic phenomena in Kozani Greek resulted in an asymmetrical vowel system, especially in unstressed position., Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistics Theory, Vol 6, No 1 (2016)

This study examined cross-dialectal differences on the perception of Greek vowels. Speakers of Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and two dialectal areas (Crete, Kozani), all with five vowels in their systems, chose best exemplar locations (prototypes) for Greek vowels embedded in a carrier sentence spoken by a speaker of their dialect. The results showed that SMG, Cretan and Kozani vowels were well separated in the perceptual space. At the same time, there were dialect-induced differences in the positioning and distances between vowels as well as in the total space area covered by each dialect. The organisation of perceived vowel space therefore seems to be dialect-specific, a finding which is consistent with production studies examining the organisation of the acoustic vowel space.

Within the AM model of intonational phonology, nuclear rather than prenuclear pitch accents typically monopolize our interest as the purported pivots for meaning distinctions among utterances. This paper compares, through one production and two perception experiments, the prenuclear field in statements versus polar questions in Greek, which can be string identical, differing only in intonation. Systematic differences in the prenuclear pitch accents of these two utterance types were found in both their peak alignment and scaling. Moreover, identification and discrimination experiments showed that listeners were attuned to these differences. These results underline the importance of research on the phonetics and phonology of prenuclear pitch accents and their contribution to the meaning of utterances.

and full text of the articles are freely available on www.degruyter.com (De Gruyter Open)., Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics, Vol 20, No 1 (2014): Major Trends in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 1, Selected Papers from the 20th ISTAL, Thessaloniki 1-3 April 2011

Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistics Theory, Vol 5, No 1 (2012)

Research on the alignment of F0 movements has shown that they align with the segmental string. This is the “segmental anchoring” hypothesis. In addition, research on the duration of segments at the edges of prosodic domains has shown that duration is a robust cue for the demarcation of prosodic levels, however, the exact operation of those cues under different conditions is still a matter of research. This paper addresses the question of how the alignment of F0 of prenuclear pitch accents and the duration of segments in Prosodic Words of Greek might interact, when produced under different prosodic boundary and lexical stress placements. We used Prosodic Words of the short “article + noun + clitic”, bearing an L*+H prenuclear pitch accent. From the results for the duration of the segments of the prosodic word we did not find support for mechanisms that have been found to operate on other languages, such as English and Dutch. The mechanisms examined were those of preboundary lengthening, polysyllabic shortening, accentual lengthening and articulatory strengthening. We found that the proclitic is shorter than the enclitic, which indicated a shortening of the proclitic. We also showed that the distance of the stress and pitch accent from the prosodic boundary causes a change on the duration of the segments of the noun of the prosodic word. That is, segments belonging to a word with stress further away from the boundary are longer than the ones with stress closer to the boundary. Regarding the alignment of F0 movements, we found that the Low tone aligns with the onset of the accented syllable, but is influenced by the existence of a word boundary. Surprisingly, we found that the H tone is not influenced by the existence of a prosodic boundary and aligns after the onset of the first postaccentual vowel, regardless of whether the clitic is a proclitic or an enclitic. Position of stress seemed to influence the alignment of the F0 movements as well, since when the pitch accent lay further away from the prosodic boundary there was more time for the rise from L to H to take place.