Constraints on Ease of Articulation in the Phonetics of Israeli Hebrew Casual Speech

Abstract:In the casual speech register, speakers naturally tend to facilitate ease of articulation, usually through processes of assimilation, reduction and elision, occasionally by insertion of certain vowels or consonantal glides. Such processes of assimilation, reduction or elision usually affect elements perceived to be weak, or minimal, and whose presence is not truly required (phonetically, or semantically), or that are easily recoverable from the context. There are, however, constraints on ease of articulation processes, preventing them from violating certain phonetic restrictions. There are also independent considerations that prevent reduction, elision or assimilation if they may affect significant semantic distinctions that are too essential to ignore. Thus, for instance, there exists a preference for secondary stress assignment resulting in alternating rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables in connected Hebrew speech; the configuration realigns itself in cases of vowel deletion, or when a "minimal" vowel is inserted to prevent sonority-hierarchy violations, or when a "stress clash" arises, and one of the syllables may need to be destressed to accommodate the alternating stress rhythm. However, another constraint assures that no destressing of the main stress of regular lexical items occur if the word concerned cannot easily be reconstructed from the context. Furthermore, no shifting is allowed in the placement of the main lexical stress, unless it is a function word or a very frequent, easily identified lexical item. A few phonetic constraints will be discussed in some detail, as well as semantic ones reassuring that the processing of meaning will not be negatively affected by phonetic "ease-of-articulation" processes.