Revealing structure: Papers in honor of Larry M. Hyman ed. by Eugene Buckley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Revealing structure: Papers in honor of Larry M. Hyman ed. by Eugene Buckley Laura J. Downing Revealing structure: Papers in honor of Larry M. Hyman. Ed. by Eugene Buckley, Thera Crane, and Jeff Good. (CSLI lecture notes 219.) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2018. Pp. ix, 292. ISBN 9781684000296. $30. Revealing structure mostly consists of papers presented to Larry Hyman in honor of his sixty-fifth birthday. The introduction to this volume of seventeen contributions gives an excellent, brief summary of Hyman’s career and provides a thoughtful guide to the connections the editors saw between the contributions and Hyman’s research over the course of his career. The editors explain that the title, Revealing structure, was chosen to invoke both the ‘detailed language-internal investigation required to … reveal grammatical patterns [and the] exploration of those patterns’ special theoretical interest’ that characterizes Hyman’s investigative style and the papers in this volume. The first contribution illustrates very clearly the ‘revealing structure’ theme. Ọládiípọ̀ Ajíbóyè and Douglas Pulleyblank provide an optimality-theoretic analysis of nasal harmony in Mọ̀bà Yorùbá (MY), comparing it to nasal harmony in Standard Yorùbá (SY). In SY, harmony is restricted to a sonorant-vowel syllable (RV), while in MY harmony expands its domain to a preceding high vowel, even across some morphological word boundaries. While obstruent consonants are transparent to cross-syllable nasal harmony, nonhigh vowels block harmony. As Ajíbóyè and Pulleyblank show, one interesting aspect of the MY data is that it cannot be accounted for in its entirety by appealing to Piggott’s (2003) approach to consonant transparency. A detailed investigation of a wide range of data shows that MY has systematic exceptions to the claim, crucial to Piggott’s approach, that consonant transparency is licensed only if all RV syllables agree in nasality. John Harris’s contribution shows that a careful look at even a well-studied language like English can lead to a fresh perspective on which prosodic structures best account for phonotactic generalizations. In this chapter, two generalizations are examined: that [aw] occurs only before coronals (e.g. shout vs. *shoup) and that [wa] darkening regularly occurs before dorsals (compare the vowel quality in swag vs. swap). These generalizations are often characterized as syllable-bound: the conditioning consonant is in the coda. However, an examination of an exhaustive set of relevant data reveals that the generalizations also hold when the triggering consonant is in the onset preceding an unstressed vowel: powder, swagger. Harris concludes, building on work like Hyman 1990a, that the relevant context for these generalizations is the foot, not the syllable, adding them to a growing set of foot-based (as opposed to syllable-based) segmental processes in English and other languages. Alan C. L. Yu’s reanalysis of the phonemic inventory of Washo resonants demonstrates that a careful investigation of a range of data supports the proposal that glottalized resonants are unitary segments, just like ‘voiceless’ resonants. They are not surface ʔ + resonant segment sequences, as had been proposed in Jacobsen’s (1964) grammar of the language. Yu provides several arguments in favor of the unitary segment analysis. First, Washo phonotactics disallow consonant clusters word-initially and limit them intervocalically. However, glottalized resonants occur in these positions. Further, reduplication copies only a CV sequence and consonant clusters are not copied in their entirety, yet a glottalized resonant can be copied. These exceptional properties follow if glottalized resonants are unitary segments. Finally, Yu shows that some glottalized resonants trigger echo-vowel epenthesis between the glottal and the resonant in word-final position, while others do not. This surface contrast can be accounted for by proposing an underlying contrast between ʔ + resonant clusters and unitary glottalized resonants, leading to a more symmetrical resonant phoneme inventory. [End Page 718] John J. Ohala’s contribution, essentially identical to Ohala 2011, proposes that a phonetic principle, the aerodynamic voicing constraint, is of wide utility in accounting for crosslinguistically robust phonological patterns. In nontechnical terms, the constraint provides a motivation for why voicing is difficult to maintain in obstruents...