Resolving the Hiatus between a Sequence of Long Vowels and the Plural Morpheme Vowel in Persian

Abstract

Persian has six vowels among which /u:/, /i:/ and /A:/ are long.The hiatus caused by adding the plural morpheme /-An/ to the nouns ending with /u:/ is resulved by the glide [w], while the hiatus in nouns ending with /i:/ and /A:/ is resulved by the glide [j]. Although the high vowels /u:/ and /i:/ are pronounced shorter, there is no change in the length of the low vowel /A:/. In this regard, the present research aims to figure out what occurs between the phonemic and phonetic representations. In so doing, two hypothses are being analyzed. According to the first one, a part of the high vowels /u:/ and /i:/ forms a corresponding glide i.e., [w] and [j] respectively, to act as an intervocalic consonant. However, in accordance with the second one, hiatus is resolved by directly inserting an intervocalic consonant that results in compensatory shortening. After arguing that the second hypothsis is correct, it is analyzed within Optimality Theory.

Keywords

• compensatory shortening
• hiatus
• intervocalic consonant insertion
• glide formation
• x-tier theory