Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

contains an analysis of data on the proportional duration of preaspiration
(i.e. the duration of preaspiration in relation to, e.g., the preceding vowel)
for the four Faroese subjects. This allows us to compare the durational
aspects of preaspiration production in Faroese with that of, for example,
Central Standard Swedish. Lastly, section 4.3.3 contains a discussion of
the variation in the production of preaspirated stops in Faroese.
4.3.1 Method and subjects
The Faroese data come from four subjects, two male (SG and EI) and
two female (MS and BJ), all speakers of the Tórshavn dialect. SG, EI and
BJ are in their thirties and MS in her forties. Spontaneous speech interaction
between the subjects was elicited using map tasks. The subjects
were recorded in pairs, with EI and MS as one pair and SG and BJ as another.
The material was transliterated by a native speaker of Tórshavn
Faroese. Since Faroese orthography is not a good predictor of phonemic
representation, the transliterations were converted from orthographic to
phonemic representations using a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion
program. 1
The total recording time was 20–35 minutes per subject. The amount
of material analysed for each subject was for EI, approximately 9.5
minutes of uninterrupted speech 2 , comprising 2344 words: for MS 9.5
minutes, 2179 words; for SG 8.4 minutes, 1961 words; and for BJ 13.2
minutes, 2950 words. A rough estimation of speaking rate indicated that,
EI uttered 6.37 syllables per second, MS 5.65, SG 5.82 and BJ 5.65 (cf.
section 4.2.1 on how this estimate was obtained). Further details on the
recording procedure and segmentation criteria were given in section 4.1
above.
4.3.2 Word-medial and word-final postvocalic stops
4.3.2.1 Stop and context classification
In this section, Faroese stops and the contexts in which they occur
are categorised on the basis of three variables (see Table 4–11). This will
1 This program was developed in connection with a project on developing a Faroese
text-to-speech synthesis system (cf. Helgason & Gullbein, 2002).
2 Cf. section 4.2.1.
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