Structure Preservation: The Resilience of Distinctive Information

Abstract

All languages have a phonemic inventory, including a set of distinctive vowels and consonants, i.e. linguistic sounds that contribute to the meaning of a word. For instance, chip [ʧ i p] contrasts with cheap [ʧip] in English, on the basis of the vowel quality; in the first case, the high front vowel is lax, whereas in the second one it is tense. We therefore say that / i / and /i/ are two distinct phonemes (segments) in English ( chapter 11: the phoneme ) and that [tense] is a distinctive feature ( chapter 17: distinctive features ) for high vowels in this language. 1 While phonemic inventories are built in agreement with the principles of Universal Grammar (UG), the exact composition of a phonemic inventory varies from one language to another. Along with the suprasegmental inventory, the phonemic inventory is a good part of what allows a listener to identify a language at first glance and to distinguish it from other languages. We expect speakers to resist either dropping phonemes or phonemic contrasts from their language's inventory, or introducing new phonemes and phonemic contrasts – although this constitutes the bread and butter of language change – since the automatic consequence of such moves is a different system. We believe that resistance to change cannot be due simply to inertia – it is not passive. In this chapter we will try to show that resistance to change is, above all, a question of contrast/category pattern resilience in the mind of the speaker, which is expressed intralinguistically (i.e. resistance to change due to the passage of time, dialect contact, etc.) and also interlinguistically (between L2 and L1, as will be illustrated in §3 with respect to loanwords). We will link contrast resilience to the traditional notion of Structure Preservation, providing a history of this notion in generative grammar in §2, and considering in §3 the question of whether it is still pertinent now that phonological rules have given way to constraints. We will also address the relation between Structure Preservation and phoneme/structure resilience in loanword adaptation from the point of view of L1 and L2. We conclude in §4.