Vowel reduction in English

The aim of the paper is to explore two closely related processes of vowel reduction in English, i.e. syllabic consonant formation and syncope. Apart from many similarities between these two processes, there are also quite a few differences and this paper presents them both. More specifically, we discuss the exact context in which they occur, try to find out the constraints governing their distribution and explain the reason for their diverse and varied effects on the preceding and following phonological material. It is pointed out that such differences arise due to two general cross-linguistic constrains operating in English

Random substitution : the case of glinding

The aim of the paper is to examine a single case of random substitution which consists in the replacement of liquids by glides, that is, gliding. This process occurs in both English and Polish and it affects children’s speech as well as the speech of those adults who did not acquire the proper pronunciation of liquids. We address the following questions: is the substitution really random, why in the majority of cases it results in glides and not in something else, what is the relationship between two articulatorily distant segments which allows them to participate in substitution, among many others. It is argued that some examples of gliding can be analysed as a simple reduction in the elemental make-up of segments, e.g. [] ~ [], others like English [] ~ [] can be the effect of phonetic enhancement sometimes called phonological reinterpretation

Flux density measurements of GPS candidate pulsars at 610 MHz using interferometric imaging technique

We conducted radio interferometric observations of six pulsars at 610 MHz using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT). All these objects were claimed or suspected to be the gigahertz-peaked spectra (GPS) pulsars. For a half of the sources in our sample the interferometric imaging provides the only means to estimate their flux at 610 MHz due to a strong pulse scatter-broadening. In our case, these pulsars have very high dispersion measure values and we present their spectra containing for the first time low-frequency measurements. The remaining three pulsars were observed at low frequencies using the conventional pulsar flux measurement method. The interferometric imaging technique allowed us to re-examine their fluxes at 610 MHz. We were able to confirm the GPS feature in the PSR B1823$-$13 spectrum and select a GPS candidate pulsar. These results clearly demonstrate that the interferometric imaging technique can be successfully applied to estimate flux density of pulsars even in the presence of strong scattering.Comment: 7 pages, 3 tables, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA