The Vocalism Quantity of Pre-Stressed Syllables in the Subdialect of the Central Region of Northern Žemaitian Kretinga

Abstract

The article deals with phonetic peculiarity of the quantity of pre-stressed syllables in the subdialect of the Central region of Northern Žemaitian Kretinga dictinguishing this subdialect from the neighbouring one of Telsiai region. The reseach was done with the help of both self-observing and experimental methods using the following programmes: Cool Edit Pro, PRAAT4.0.31 sound analysis programme created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink, the scientists of the university of Amsterdam. The statistical analysis was performed by the help of programme STUDENT (programming language TURBO-PASCAL, v. 7.0) created by Prof. Dr Habil of Vilnius university Aleksas Girdenis. The Analysis showed that the lengthening of long vowels and diphthongs of the first component is typical to the Central region of Northern Žemaitian Kretinga.While analysing the average of their duration, it was determined that the general vowel lengthening average in mixed diftongs, in fact, does not differ from the average length of the average of long vowels, such as i˙ , u˙, i. e the ratio of average duration is 1: 1,07. Unstressed syllables when preceeded by either short or semi-long stressed syllables in the subdialect of the Central region of Northern Žemaitian Kretinga are shorter when preceeded by long syllables. The presumption could be drawn that in the subdialect of the Central region of Northern Žemaitian Kretinga the lenght of pre-stressed syllables is the result of the communication between Žemaitians and Curonians. This reseach stimulates the interest to go deeper into those problems, which might specify the vocalism changes of that period. Article in Lithuanian