Incomplete neutralization and the blueprint model of production

Abstract

The division of labor between the phonetic and phonological modules in generative linguistics has often been allocated such that phonology handles the discrete and symbolic aspects of a language's sound system, while the phonetics transforms the symbols either into, or from, continuously varying acoustic and/or articulatory representations. This type of architecture struggles with accounting for incomplete neutralization where two segments are neutralized phonologically, but maintain a measurable phonetic distinction. While some explanations of this phenomenon blur the lines between phonetics and phonology, this paper provides an alternate approach by restructuring the architecture of "modular feedforward models". This is done by conceptualizing the language production pipeline as a series of functions and considering the types of each function. The resulting model is referred to as the `Blueprint Model of Production' and maintains many of the assumptions of modular feedforward models while also being able to explain incomplete neutralization data. Final devoicing is used as an example case.