It's that schwa again! Towards a typology of Salish schwa

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a brief review and comparison of the patterns of inserted schwa across multiple Salish languages; and second, to make the initial move towards applying Gestural Phonology to Salish languages. The intent is to begin to develop a typology of schwa in Salish. The first part of this paper reviews the literature on patterns of inserted schwa in ten Salish languages and the second part attempts to unite the observed patterns by proposing an analysis within the framework of Gestural Phonology. In this analysis, both epenthetic and excrescent schwas are proposed to come from an underlying gap between consonant gestures which results from a consonantal coordination constraint that is active in all Salish languages.