6 - Schwa and Syllabic Sonorants

Summary

Chapter 6 gives an overview of the properties of schwa and schwa syllables. Schwa has sometimes been analyzed as non-phonemic: It is the epenthetic vowel in German and it is the only non-moraic vowel of German. Moreover, it is featurally underspecified and does not fit the lax–tense dichotomy of the full vowels. The chapter starts with a review of the distributional properties of both schwa and syllabic sonorants in simplex and complex words. Both schwa and syllabic sonorants are often suffixal inflectional morphemes, but they also regularly appear in monomorphemic words. A part of the chapter is dedicated to sequences of sonorants that can be syllabic, and how different choices are made in different morphological environments. Again, OT analyses are provided and it is shown how syllable structure, morphological constraints and the different sonorants all play a role in the distribution of the syllabic and non-syllabic versions of the sonorants.