Vowel insertion in Scottish Gaelic

Abstract

Scottish Gaelic has been cited as an instance of vowel excrescence (Hall, 2006). One of the defining properties of such vowels is that they are phono- logically inert and are not motivated by—nor do they contribute to—the syllable structure of a language. In this paper, we report on a series of ex- periments tapping into native speakers’ intuitions of syllable structure in Scottish Gaelic. Insofar as intuitions about syllable count and syllabification reflect phonological structure, our results suggest that the relevant vowels of Scottish Gaelic are not phonologically inert and contribute directly to na- tive speaker intuitions, affecting the number of syllables and the affiliation of consonants to those syllables. However, our results also establish that the relevant vowels have an intermediate phonological status, distinguishing them from underlying vowels as well.