Unstressed Vowel Syncope in Maybalay Atayal as a Result of Positional Augmentation

Abstract: The phonology of Maybalay Atayal, an understudied C’uli’ ([ʦɿʔulíʔ]) dialect of Atayal spoken in Wufeng Township, Hsinchu County, northern Taiwan, has received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper examines previous work on Maybalay and provides alternative generalizations of the data based on fieldwork. Maybalay Atayal shows vowel-zero alternations in pre-tonic unstressed syllables, which were treated as epenthesis/metathesis in the literature but are reanalyzed as vowel neutralization and syncope in the present study. The syncopating process is disguised by prepenultimate neutralization to the low vowel [a] in the language, which renders epenthesis appealing at first sight. Vowel syncope in Maybalay always targets the second vowels in words with more than three syllables, leaving the final two vowels intact and giving rise to a word-initial closed syllable. I argue that initial syllable prominence, rather than metrical weakness, plays a crucial role in triggering unstressed vowel syncope in Maybalay Atayal and that a noniterative iambic foot at the right word edge blocks vowel syncope in shorter words. The data are captured via positional augmentation and positional faithfulness constraints within Optimality Theory.