Phonology without universal grammar

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Emergent phonology

To what extent do complex phonological patterns require the postulation of universal mechanisms specific to language? In this volume, we explore the Emergent Hypothesis, that the innate language-specific faculty driving the shape of adult grammars is minimal, with grammar development relying instead on cognitive capacities of a general nature. Generalisations about sounds, and about the way sounds are organised into meaningful units, are constructed in a bottom-up fashion: As such, phonology is emergent. We present arguments for considering the Emergent Hypothesis, both conceptually and by working through an extended example in order to demonstrate how an adult grammar might emerge from the input encountered by a learner. Developing a concrete, data-driven approach, we argue that the conventional, abstract notion of unique underlying representations is unmotivated; such underlying representations would require some innate principle to ensure their postulation by a learner. We review the history of the concept and show that such postulated forms result in undesirable phonological consequences. We work through several case studies to illustrate how various types of phonological patterns might be accounted for in the proposed framework. The case studies illustrate patterns of allophony, of productive and unproductive patterns of alternation, and cases where the surface manifestation of a feature does not seem to correspond to its morphological source. We consider cases where a phonetic distinction that is binary seems to manifest itself in a way that is morphologically ternary, and we consider cases where underlying representations of considerable abstractness have been posited in previous frameworks. We also consider cases of opacity, where observed phonological properties do not neatly map onto the phonological generalisations governing patterns of alternation

Individual-level contact limits phonological complexity: Evidence from bunched and retroflex /ɹ/

We compare the complexity of idiosyncratic sound patterns involving American English /ɹ/ with the relative simplicity of clear/dark /l/ allophony patterns found in English and other languages. For /ɹ/, we report an ultrasound-based articulatory study of 27 speakers of American English. Two speakers use only retroflex /ɹ/, 16 use only bunched /ɹ/, and nine use both /ɹ/ types, with idiosyncratic allophonic distributions. These allophony patterns are covert, because the difference between bunched and retroflex /ɹ/ is not readily perceived by listeners. We compare this typology of /ɹ/ allophony patterns to clear/dark /l/ allophony patterns in 17 languages. On the basis of the observed patterns, we show that individual-level /ɹ/ allophony and language-level /l/ allophony exhibit similar phonetic grounding, but that /ɹ/ allophony patterns are considerably more complex. The low complexity of language-level /l/ allophony patterns, which are more readily perceived by listeners, is argued to be the result of individual-level contact in the development of sound patterns. More generally, we argue that familiar phonological patterns (which are relatively simple and homogeneous within communities) may arise from individual-level articulatory patterns, which may be complex and speaker-specific, by a process of koineization. We conclude that two classic properties of phonological rules, phonetic naturalness and simplicity, arise from different sources.published_or_final_versio

Phonological and phonetic properties of nasal substitution in Sasak and Javanese

Austronesian languages such as Sasak and Javanese have a pattern of morphological nasal substitution, where nasals alternate with homorganic oral obstruents—except that [s] is described as alternating with [ɲ], not with [n]. This appears to be an abstract morphophonological relation between [s] and [ɲ] where other parts of the paradigm have a concrete homorganic relation. Articulatory ultrasound data were collected of productions of [t, n, ʨ, ɲ], along with [s] and its nasal counterpart from two languages, from 10 Sasak and 8 Javanese speakers. Comparisons of lingual contours using a root mean square analysis were evaluated with linear mixed-effects regression models, a method that proves reliable for testing questions of phonological neutralization. In both languages, [t, n, s] exhibit a high degree of articulatory similarity, whereas postalveolar [ʨ] and its nasal counterpart [ɲ] exhibited less similarity. The nasal counterpart of [s] was identical in articulation to [ɲ]. This indicates an abstract, rather than concrete, relationship between [s] and its morphophonological nasal counterpart, with the two sounds not sharing articulatory place in either Sasak or Javanese.published_or_final_versio

Articulatory Strategies for Place Contrasts of Unreleased Final Stops on Preceding Vowels: Evidence from Ultrasound Imaging

This ultrasound study examines the gestural coordination involved in vowel-to-consonant sequences concerning unreleased final stops, which are more susceptible to reduction than their released counterparts. Thus, coarticulatory information on the preceding vowel is important to signal place contrasts of post-vocalic stops. The gestural coordination of vowel-consonant sequences of monosyllabic words in Cantonese represents a testing case for having preserved phonemic contrasts of six unreleased final stops in a range of vowel contexts. Preliminary results from smoothing spline ANOVA and linear mixed-effect regression show that coarticulatory patterns depend on vowel height, that is, non-high vowels are undergoing gradual coarticulation whereas high vowels are phonologising the lingual properties of the unreleased final stops on the preceding vowels

Underspecification in Yawelmani phonology and morphology

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1984.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES.Bibliography: leaves 352-359.by Diana Bennett Archangeli.Ph.D