3 research outputs found
Consonant colour and vocalism in the history of Irish
Wydział AnglistykiNiniejsza praca poświęcona jest związanym ze sobą kwestiom barwienia spółgłosek i wokalizmu w historii języka Irlandzkiego, ze szczególną uwagą na okres staro-irlandzki. Głównym twierdzeniem pracy jest to, że język staro-irlandzki miał trzy odrębne serie spółgłosek, polegających na barwieniu, oraz minimalny (wertykalny) system samogłosek składający się z dwóch tylko komponentów. Obrona głównego twierdzenia ma podwójny charakter: empiryczny i typologiczny. Część typologiczna bazuje na kompleksowym przeglądzie minimalnych systemów samogłosek w językach świata. Część empiryczna oparta jest na opisie morfologii czasownika staro-irlandzkiego, w którym występują trzy barwy spółgłoskowe, ale tylko dwie samogłoski.This dissertation deals with the related questions of consonant colour and vocalism in the history of Irish, focusing particularly on the Old Irish period. It argues that Old Irish had three distinct series of consonant colour, and a vertical vowel system of only two members. This position is defended typologically, by means of a comprehensive survey of minimal and vertical vowel systems in the cross-linguistic literature, and also empirically, through a detailed description of Old Irish verbal morphology in terms of a phonological system with three consonant colours and only two vowels
Compression effects, perceptual asymmetries, and the grammar of timing
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 272-279).This dissertation reports the results of two English experiments on timing and perception. The first experiment demonstrates asymmetries in timing between consonants and vowels, which depend on the manner of the consonant. The second experiment shows that these asymmetries in speech production are mirrored by perceptual asymmetries among consonants with different manner features. We argue that these phenomena are best described in terms of auditory rather than articulatory representations. A formal analysis is developed using weighted, gradiently-violable constraints on segment and syllable duration. Because the constraints make reference to the auditory features of segments, the analysis can derive the relationship between asymmetries in speech production and asymmetries in speech perception. The patterns of timing discovered here appear to interact in limited ways with systems of phonological contrast. We incorporate the duration constraints proposed here into a phonetically-driven model of phonology, examining the predictions that such an approach makes about phonological typology.by Jonah Katz.Ph.D
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Gradience and locality in phonology: Case studies from Turkic vowel harmony
In very general terms, phonology is the study of both the representational and computational properties of human sound patterns. These issues have been the focus of descriptive, formal, typological, and experimental work. This dissertation draws on experimental and fieldwork data from vowel harmony in four Central Asian Turkic languages, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uyghur, and Uzbek, to examine the computational and representational nature of vowel harmony patterns. One perennial computational question relates to the nature of phonological dependencies – how local must they be? In the dissertation I examine reported transparency in Uyghur backness harmony to evaluate previous analyses of transparent /i/ in the language. Results indicate that putatively transparent vowels actually undergo harmony, which in turn suggests that the analysis of Uyghur is computationally far simpler than previously thought. The dissertation also investigates the strictness with which locality is evaluated, comparing various proposals concerning the participation of consonants in vowel harmony, developing a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between phonetics and phonology that accounts for segment-intrinsic resistance to coarticulation in harmony.In addition to locality, the dissertation examines the nature of phonological representations. Structuralist and Generative research has generally assumed that phonology manipulates abstract categorical variables, in contrast to the gradient variables that pervade phonetics. As an example, Zsiga (1997) argues that vowel harmony, in contrast to gradient phonetic assimilation, produces categorical alternations between target vowels whose output forms are indistinguishable from their triggering counterparts. Results from an acoustic study suggest that backness harmony in Kazakh and Uyghur produces output sounds that systematically differ from trigger vowel qualities, with the assimilatory effect of harmony gradiently petering out across the word. After comparing findings to plausible phonetic and phonological accounts, I argue that the best account of the data involves gradient phonology. Throughout the rest of the dissertation I develop the claim that phonology may be gradient, examining gradience in harmony from perceptual, formal, and typological perspectives