Feature specifications and contrast in vowel harmony: the orthography and phonology of Old Norwegian height harmony

In this thesis, I provide a new approach to the role of phonological patterning in determining the featural content of phonological relations and the size and shape of sound inventories. The empirical scope of this project has particular focus on vowel harmony and vocalic features with an extended case study of Old Norwegian. Vowel harmony, simply defined, is a process where vowels in a word show systematic correspondence for some feature. Because of its many moving parts and obvious class behaviour, vowel harmony and harmony languages provide one of the best laboratories for exploring the emergence, acquisition, specification, and common patterning of phonological features. In chapter 1 I provide an introduction to Old Norwegian vowel harmony and some unexplained harmony exceptions. This chapter explores parallel phenomena in the typology of harmony languages and the theoretical challenges these patterns pose. In particular, I illustrate that non-harmonising segments display three distinct behaviours with respect to phonological activity and visibility while the core components of popular grammatical and representational approaches to vowel harmony commonly only predict two. I suggest the solution to this problem lies in the representation and definition of phonological contrastivity. Chapter 2 presents the principal components of a new approach to the acquisition and specification of features using a version of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher, Piggott & Rice 1994; D. C. Hall 2007; Dresher 2003, 2009) which incorporates emergent and substance-free features and feature-nodes (Iosad 2017a). In this chapter I argue that phonological features, segments, feature classes, and whole sound inventories emerge according to the Correlate Contrastivist Hypothesis which holds that a language’s phonemic inventory is defined by the set of active phonological features required to express the language’s phonological regularities. Drawing insights from Westergaard’s (2009, 2013, 2014) model of micro-cues, I posit that language learners generalise small pieces of abstract linguistic structures (‘micro-cues’) in the form of features and feature co-occurrence restrictions while parsing linguistic input. In the course of language acquisition, these micro-cues accumulate, and the sum of these cues defines a sound inventory. I argue a segment’s feature specifications and the shape of feature classes in a language are determined by a version of the Successive Division Algorithm (Dresher 2009, §7.8; D. C. Hall 2007, §1.2.7; Mackenzie 2013, 2016) which takes an ordered set of representational micro-cues as its input and returns a contrastively specified segment inventory as its output. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how these components combined with the hierarchical organisation of features afforded by the contrastive hierarchy architecture recapitulates all the important insights of feature geometry, providing an economical and principled model of phonological representations which narrowly vary cross-linguistically. In chapter 3 I present a formal model of harmony using a licensing approach, adapted from Iosad (2017a) and Walker (2005), inspired by the recipient-oriented model of Nevins (2010). Using a detailed study of cross-dialectal microvariation in harmony and harmony neutrality in Yoruba (Atlantic-Congo), I demonstrate that this framework makes the right predictions, affording a ternary contrast in the behaviour of non-alternating harmony segments without any necessary additional grammatical mechanisms. A principal assumption of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory is that the hierarchical scope of features is cross-linguistically variable, and this chapter illustrates how variable feature ordering predicts common asymmetries across harmony languages in the presence or absence of required agreement for orthogonal features (so-called ‘parasitic harmony’). Specifically, the contrastive hierarchy derives parasitic harmony languages by nesting harmony feature contrasts within other featural divisions. This chapter closes with an exploration of the predicted typology of non-/parasitic systems and provides explicit diagnostics for identifying true vs. false parasitic harmony. The theoretical chapters present a coherent, limited, and highly predictive model of phonological representations and vowel harmony, but the real value of a theory is whether it can provide new insights on questions which have otherwise resisted explanation. Old Norwegian vowels and vowel harmony represent such an example. Old Norwegian vowel harmony displays remarkably complex patterns, and its analysis is considerably complicated by the philological nature of available evidence. Chapter 4 presents the materials and methods I employ for the automated collection and phonological annotation of Old Norwegian vowel sequences in a corpus of mid-to-late 13th-century manuscripts. The corpus study’s data set is freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/ gj6n-js33. Chapter 5 provides a grapho-phonological study of the Old Norwegian vowel inventory and segmental phonological patterns. This corpus study shows that Old Norwegian manuscripts display robust (pre-decay), transitional, and decayed vowel harmony, which provides invaluable empirical evidence for the otherwise poorly documented decay of harmony systems. The rest of the chapter provides a detailed survey of pre-decay Old Norwegian surface harmony patterns and their interaction with other sound processes and sound changes (e.g. umlauts, vowel deletions, and vowel mergers). A major goal of this project has been to develop tangible heuristics for the reconstruction of historical phonological representations on the basis of phonological patterns evidenced in textual source material. Tying together this thesis’ theoretical and empirical components, I show in chapter 6 how the active vocalic features and feature co-occurrence restrictions in Old Norwegian can be discerned according to the Correlate Contrastivist Hypothesis. In turn, the intricate harmony and neutral harmony patterns in Old Norwegian receive a straightforward explanation following these representational generalisations. This case study illustrates how even complex harmony systems such as Old Norwegian can be reduced to simple emergent effects of the categorisation and co-occurrence of features in contrastive feature hierarchies. This chapter concludes with a historical phonological investigation of the implications of this harmony system for the status of other Old Norwegian sound patterns. The main features of this thesis’ theoretical component and useful abstract schemata are provided in chapter 7 to aid in applying this framework to new data. For ease of comparison, I provide an appendix with contrastive hierarchies and summaries of each harmony language cited in this thesis. The unique contribution of Old Norwegian neutral harmony patterns within the typology of vowel harmony languages provides important evidence for the role of feature specifications and contrastivity in phonology. This thesis’ broad typological and narrow empirical studies confirm the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of the proposed framework in providing novel insights on new and old problems regarding the link between phonological representations and phonological patterns

The licensing and interpretation of coronality: A new approach.

This thesis presents a new approach to the behavior of coronal segments. It examines seven aspects of coronal uniqueness; (i) the interaction of coronal consonants with front vowels, (ii) the confinement of liquids to coronal Place, (iii) the preference of "weak" syllabic sites for coronal Place, the processes of (iv) palatalization and (v) coronalization of coronal and non-coronal consonants by palatal glides and front vowels, (vi) the confinement of consonant harmony processes to consonants of coronal Place, and finally, (vii) the frequency and subplace richness of the coronal Place. It is argued that this range of behavior can be given a unified analysis if coronality is represented by the Government Phonological element [I]. Further, this element is argued to be the head of a Resonance Phrase in an element-geometric tree which is divided into a Resonance, Manner and Laryngeal Phrase. The headship of [I] gives this element greater powers to license other (Place, Manner and Laryngeal) elements, so deriving the behavior noted. This is contrasted with approaches which underspecify coronal Place, or try to capture coronal anomalies by recourse to phonetic context. The headship or dependency of elements drives element combinations, and thus derives the structure of phonemic inventories. This is traced to functional underpinnings, drawing on phonetic theories which argue for the optimality of segments based on the acoustically integrative effects of the articulations by which they are executed. The interpretation of [I] is thus investigated in some detail. At the level of segment generation, therefore, it is argued that there are formal and functional constraints operating. Finally, the distribution of coronal segments in the word is looked at in a broad range of typologically diverse languages. This is modeled using the above tools, in conjunction with a Government Phonology approach to syllabic structure and licensing

Representation and variation in substance-free phonology:A case study in Celtic

This thesis presents a comprehensive analysis of the phonological patterns of two varieties of Brythonic Celtic in the framework of substance-free phonology. I argue that cross-linguistic variation in sound patterns does not derive solely from differences in grammars (implemented as Optimality Theoretic constraint rankings). Instead, I adopt the substance-free framework, based on the principle of modularity and autonomy of the phonological component, to account for cross-linguistic phonological and phonetic variation. Phonological representations in substance-free phonology are built up without regard to the physical implementation of phonological units, on the basis of the system of contrasts and patterns of alternation. Although this insight is not new when couched in terms of a language-specific assignment of a set of universal phonological features, I argue that the mapping between phonology and phonetics is also not universal and deterministic, and reject the universality of the feature set. Instead, I argue for a rich interface between phonology and phonetics. Based on this understanding of the nature of variation, I provide a holistic analysis of the sound systems of two closely related languages: Pembrokeshire Welsh and Bothoa Breton. I propose an account in terms of a rich representational theory. Among other proposals, I defend the need for surface ternary contrasts, which I propose to implement using feature geometry. I also show that the substance-free approach, which decouples phonological representation from phonetic realization, strikes the correct balance between innatist and emergentist approaches to phonological markedness; I demonstrate this by way of an extensive case study of laryngeal phonology, which leads to a reinterpetation of the approach known as 'laryngeal realism'. I also argue that the phonological component of grammar should allow constraints with prima facie undesirable factorial consequences, if such constraints are needed to account for functionally unmotivated sound patterns, and discuss the consequences of this approach for the substance-free nature of phonological computation

Induction of the morphology of natural language : unsupervised morpheme segmentation with application to automatic speech recognition

In order to develop computer applications that successfully process natural language data (text and speech), one needs good models of the vocabulary and grammar of as many languages as possible. According to standard linguistic theory, words consist of morphemes, which are the smallest individually meaningful elements in a language. Since an immense number of word forms can be constructed by combining a limited set of morphemes, the capability of understanding and producing new word forms depends on knowing which morphemes are involved (e.g., "water, water+s, water+y, water+less, water+less+ness, sea+water"). Morpheme boundaries are not normally marked in text unless they coincide with word boundaries. The main objective of this thesis is to devise a method that discovers the likely locations of the morpheme boundaries in words of any language. The method proposed, called Morfessor, learns a simple model of concatenative morphology (word forming) in an unsupervised manner from plain text. Morfessor is formulated as a Bayesian, probabilistic model. That is, it does not rely on predefined grammatical rules of the language, but makes use of statistical properties of the input text. Morfessor situates itself between two types of existing unsupervised methods: morphology learning vs. word segmentation algorithms. In contrast to existing morphology learning algorithms, Morfessor can handle words consisting of a varying and possibly high number of morphemes. This is a requirement for coping with highly-inflecting and compounding languages, such as Finnish. In contrast to existing word segmentation methods, Morfessor learns a simple grammar that takes into account sequential dependencies, which improves the quality of the proposed segmentations. Morfessor is evaluated in two complementary ways in this work: directly by comparing to linguistic reference morpheme segmentations of Finnish and English words and indirectly as a component of a large (or virtually unlimited) vocabulary Finnish speech recognition system. In both cases, Morfessor is shown to outperform state-of-the-art solutions. The linguistic reference segmentations were produced as part of the current work, based on existing linguistic resources. This has resulted in a morphological gold standard, called Hutmegs, containing analyses of a large number of Finnish and English word forms.reviewe

Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Source at https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004416833.The Viennese Jesuit court astronomer Maximilian Hell was a nodal figure in the eighteenth-century circulation of knowledge. He was already famous by the time of his celebrated 1769 expedition for the observation of the transit of Venus in northern Scandinavia. However, the 1773 suppression of his order forced Hell to develop ingenious strategies of accommodation to changing international and domestic circumstances. Through a study of his career in local, regional, imperial, and global contexts, this book sheds new light on the complex relationship between the Enlightenment, Catholicism, administrative and academic reform in the Habsburg monarchy, and the practices and ends of cultivating science in the Republic of Letters around the end of the first era of the Society of Jesus