Different speakers, different grammars: Productivity and representation of Xhosa labial palatalization

William G Bennett,Aaron Braver

doi:10.3765/pda.v2art6.9

Abstract

While cross-linguistic studies suggest that palatalization is preferentially triggered by high and front vocoids, and that it targets coronals or dorsals, Xhosa has a process of palatalization that is triggered by [w], and that targets only bilabials. This paper presents a wug test experiment, showing that some Xhosa speakers do systematically generalize this phenomenon to nonce words. This suggests that for those speakers, labial palatalization is indeed learned as part of their phonological grammar. Additionally, our findings show that some other speakers systematically do not apply palatalization in nonce words, suggesting that they have learned it as a pattern in the lexicon, and not as part of phonology. Drawing on evidence from a separate wug test experiment, we show that the inter-speaker variation in our results cannot be explained away as a task effect. As such, our results show that different speakers can have fundamentally different grammatical representations of the same sound pattern. Though Xhosa’s labial palatalization pattern is phonetically unnatural, that does not indicate that it is necessarily outside the domain of phonology proper.

Highlights

Previous cross-linguistic studies of palatalization identify numerous clear and robust tendencies, some of which verge on being universals (Bateman 2007, 2011; Kochetov 2011)
Given that synchronic labial palatalization is phonetically unnatural, the results presented in this paper are evidence that a phonetically unnatural pattern can be learned and represented as synchronic phonology
The first is that different speakers of the same language, even those from the same speech community, can have significantly different phonological grammars

Summary

Introduction

Previous cross-linguistic studies of palatalization identify numerous clear and robust tendencies, some of which verge on being universals (Bateman 2007, 2011; Kochetov 2011). One well-known tendency is that palatalization is most commonly triggered by high and front vocoids – a trend so clear that Bhat’s (1978) pioneering survey takes it as a sufficient characteristic for defining the term ‘palatalization’. Another clear tendency is that palatalizing alternations preferentially target coronals or dorsals, and not labials. Stereotypical palatalization processes are alternations such as ti→tji, ti→tʃi, or ki→tʃi – alveolars and/or velars becoming (alveo)-palatal before a high, front, vowel. Deviations from this norm do exist, . The causative extension is reconstructed with the same high front vocoid, and never induces palatalization

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Discussion

Conclusion