Phonetic Motivation Research Articles

Balancing social determinism vs. sound change

Balancing social determinism vs. sound change

Postlabial raising and paradigmatic leveling in A’ingae: A diachronic study from the field

This paper discusses and analyzes the variation between ai and ɨi in A’ingae(or Cofán, an Amazonian isolate, ISO 639-3: con) by comparing the data reported in Borman’s (1976) dictionary with contemporary productions. In Borman (1976), ai does not generally appear after labial consonants; the distribution of ɨi is not restricted. In some modern productions, postlabial ai is allowed when the diphthong crosses a morpheme boundary (a + i). I propose that Borman’s (1976) distribution of ai and ɨi is a consequence of a diachronic change of ai to ɨi after labial consonants (* ai > ɨi /B _). The contemporary distribution reflects paradigm leveling and contact-induced replacement: Borman’s (1976) ɨi corresponds to contemporary ai if a is present in another related form. In novel productively-formed words, the availability of postlabial raising is speaker-specific. The proposed sound change of postlabial raising (*ai > ɨi /B _) is unusual and lacks obvious phonetic motivation. I speculate that postlabial raising reflects postlabial rounding (*ai > * ui /B _) opacified by subsequent unconditioned unrounding and centralizing of the back round vowel (* u > ɨ).

Vowel duration before voiced and voiceless stops in the Indian English of Assamese speakers

Speakers of many English varieties produce longer vowels before voiced obstruent codas than before voiceless (e.g., House and Fairbanks, 1953; Chen, 1970; Umeda, 1975; Van Santen, 1992), though the extent can vary (Jacewicz et al., 2007; Tanner et al., 2019; Deterding, 2005). While phonetic motivations have been proposed to explain this pattern (Ohala, 1983; Kluender et al., 1988), the effect in some varieties of English is observed to be larger than phonetically motivated (Ohala, 1983; Keating, 1985); furthermore, some languages have less of a voicing effect (e.g., Korean, Russian, and French in Chen, 1970) and others may have none at all (e.g., Polish and Czech in Keating, 1985). This study investigates the phenomenon in the second largest variety of English by population, Indian English. Twenty Indian English speakers, all with L1 Assamese, were recorded reading a word list including 40 monosyllables that place vowels before voiced and voiceless versions of the same stop. We measure vowel duration using a Praat script to determine whether and to what extent this variety shares in the lengthening pattern, and in addition to providing the first measures of the phenomenon in Indian English, our results will be compared with other varieties of English and other languages.

The Second-Language Productivity of Two Mandarin Tone Sandhi Patterns

This study investigates whether the phonetic motivation of two Mandarin tone sandhi patterns influences second-language (L2) learners’ productivity in novel words. Research has suggested that the Mandarin third tone sandhi (T3 sandhi) and Half-T3 sandhi might pose different learning challenges for L2 learners, but there is no evidence that phonetic motivation influences L2 learners’ productive application of the tone sandhi rules. This study re-examines L2 learners’ productive application of the two sandhi patterns and further tests whether their productivity patterns change with increasing Mandarin proficiency. Native Mandarin speakers and Korean-speaking learners of Mandarin with high and low proficiency levels completed a wug production experiment that included both real and novel Mandarin disyllabic words. The results of a comparison of real and novel words showed a low productivity of the T3 sandhi among the L2 learners, but no such pattern was found for the Half-T3 sandhi. The differences in the productivity of the two sandhi patterns for L2 learners did not change with increasing Mandarin proficiency, although there was a difference in the production of novel words involving the T3 sandhi, which may be explained by improved metalinguistic knowledge. These results indicated the relevance of phonetic motivation to L2 productivity of the tone sandhi patterns in Mandarin.

SG] and Final Consonant Allophony in Tz'utujil

This paper considers two phenomena in Tz'utujil (Mayan) phonology: final sonorant devoicing and final aspiration of plain (pulmonic) stops and affricates. Both occur word-internally in coda position, as well as word-finally. I present an Optimality-Theoretic (OT) analysis which accounts for both of these phenomena via positional constraints on [spread glottis] ([SG]). This analysis also accounts for attested variation in final aspiration and devoicing across the Mayan language family and predicts an implicational relationship between final nasal devoicing, final sonorant devoicing, and final obstruent aspiration. Final sonorant devoicing is typologically rare and somewhat difficult to explain in terms of phonetic motivation. Tz'utujil may be able to provide insight into the typology of laryngeal features and the roles of contrast and phonetic pressures in phonology.

Why phonetically-motivated constraints do not lead to phonetic determinism: The relevance of aspiration in cueing NC sequences in Tumbuka

This paper examines the role of phonetic cues to postnasal laryngeal contrasts, language-specific differences in the use of these cues, and the phonetic naturalness of the different cues. While many studies have shown that long stop closure duration is a well-established cue to voicelessness in the postnasal context (see, e.g., Cohn & Riehl 2012, who claim this to be a universal property), the present study focusses on the role of aspiration noise in maintaining a voicing contrast in the postnasal environment. It provides experimental data from the Bantu language Tumbuka to illustrate that aspiration noise can preserve a postnasal laryngeal contrast even when stop closure duration is short. Though typologically less common, we show that the use of aspiration as a cue is also phonetically motivated. Furthermore, we show that such phonetic motivation should not be directly incorporated into phonology (e.g., as markedness constraints in OT). Instead, we employ the BiPhon model (Boersma 2007), which allows for a strict distinction between the modules of phonetics and phonology, and which formalizes the mapping of phonetic cues onto phonological representations via cue constraints, avoiding the problem of phonetic determinism.

Lingua-Semantic Issues of Economic Texts

There are various types and subtypes of scientific texts, depending on their designation and the relevance to different fields. Above all, the unique scientific texts intended for professionals and the texts written in scientific and business style for mass readers are mentioned. Each of them has got an informative function. The most widespread and essential system in a functional signalling system is language. Words should be motivated for people to assimilate the language and remember its signs. The study of the history of languages shows that the motivation of language signs in the early development of languages, the imitation of sound and imitation of an image are observed more sharply in words. In language, the sign has got the semantic, morphological and phonetic motivation. The motivation of language signs creates functional styles. Each text should the priority bear the characteristics of any style. For studying the lingo-semantic features of the economic texts, it is first and foremost necessary to investigate their stylistic possibilities and terminological system. The forms of speech in language manifest themselves in the form of functional styles. The number and nature of the styles are mentioned differently. The artistic, scientific-technical and formal-business styles among them are considered to be the main functional styles. The language of economic texts belongs to the business style; however, at the same time, the factor of using the terminological lexicon inherent in the scientific style forms the core of economic texts.

英语次要拟声词的语音理据及其翻译探究——以国内主要英汉词典例句为例

英语次要拟声词的语音理据及其翻译探究——以国内主要英汉词典例句为例

A Critical Review of Some Contentious Issues in the Phonetics and Phonology of Ẹdo, Igbo, and Yoruba

Some contentious/controversial issues in the Phonetics/Phonologies of Ẹdo, Igbo, and Yoruba, (all members of the Kwa group of languages) are examined in this paper. This includes the appropriateness or otherwise of the use of the term “coalescence” in phonology based on available data in Ẹdo and Yoruba. The data from the Ẹdo language, and the reanalyzed Yoruba data do not seem to support the continued use of the term “coalescence” without any overt phonetic motivation as a tool for defining/describing what is actually vowel assimilation, vowel elision, and tone shift as a set of phonologically ordered processes. The second issue examined in this paper is the generally held view of the total assimilation of V₂ by V₃ across word boundary in a V₁CV₂ # V₃CV₄ collocation in Igbo. It is a known fact in languages that a more plausible (natural) assimilatory process involves a left to right movement not a right to left movement. It is argued that the so-called (total) vowel assimilation in Igbo V₁CV₂ # V₃CV₄ collocation is simply the case of the elision of V₂, and the re-association of the tone thereon with V₃, i. e., the first vowel of the second word. The autosegmental perspective is employed to elucidate this fact. In the third issue examined, it is argued that mutual exclusivity, used as the defining characteristic of languages that manifest vowel harmony, effectively excludes the Ẹdo and other Ẹdoid languages, in which there is free co-occurrence of vowels in any position of the word from being characterized as languages that manifest vowel harmony. The fourth issue examined is the manifestation of the downdrift and downstep phenomena. It is argued that the phenomena are language specific: non-phonemic in Ẹdo, involving a set of phonologically ordered rules whereas it is phonemic in Igbo. It is demonstrated that the only condition for obtaining a downstepped tone in Ẹdo is the presence of a H # L tone pattern across word boundary. The donwnstepped High tone in Igbo is phonemic irrespective of the nature (voice or voiceless) of the intervocalic consonants in VCV words.

Phonosemantic interpretation of lexical units in the context of Russian and Slovak linguocultures

Phonosemantics is one of the youngest disciplines in the modern linguistics but takes an important part in the intercultural communication. The purpose of the article is to carry out the comparative analysis of lexical units of the Russian and Slovak language systems from the perspective of phonosemantics and philological hermeneutics. There has been made an attempt to study the correlation between the phonetic and semantic motivations of lexemes and paroemias (proverbs and sayings) in the system of the Russian and Slovak languages on the basis of the phonosemantic analysis and hermeneutic method. The mechanism for determining the language connotation on the knowledge based system makes it possible to reveal the linguocultural peculiarities of phraseological units, taking into account national-cultural, territorial, ethnolinguistic factors provided the individual’s cognitive abilities are activated. The problem of decoding of semantics in the situation of cross-cultural cooperation is not researched only from the view of the traditional linguistics, but also by means of cognitive activities: perception, presentation, reflection, interpretation. The adequate interpretation of the linguo-cultural phenomena and lexical units is the reflection in the internal communication aimed at the decoding of cultural and language code. In the external communication the reflection of the individual is expressed in the interpretation. The phonosemantic analysis, based on the description of natural-cultural lexical blocks from the view of philological hermeneutics, was revealed at first differences and similarities in Russian and Slovak languages; secondly, it were determined the so-called linguocultural codes. The analysis of lexical units in the Russian and Slovak languages has revealed common and distinctive peculiarities of the languages regarding their phonology and semantics. Perception and interpretation of linguistic units in foreign culture helps to achieve the most important communicative and pragmatic purpose – the establishment of intercultural and interpersonal parity and mutual understanding in the process of communicative interaction.

Estudo acústico sobre a dupla marcação de plural em adjetivos derivados em -oso(s) no português brasileiro

Este artigo apresenta um estudo acústico sobre a duplamarcac?a?o de plural em adjetivos derivados em *--osos* no portugue?sbrasileiro, observando possi?veis comportamentos metafo?nicos,compreendidos como a alterac?a?o de timbre da vogal to?nica induzida pelavogal postônica. Um experimento de produção com quatro condições deteste foi realizado, duas com os adjetivos introduzidos em sintagmasnominais objeto e duas com os adjetivos inseridos em sintagmas nominaissujeito. Foram coletados dados de fala de quatro participantes do sexofeminino de dois municípios do Estado de Sa?o Paulo. Com base naFonologia de Uso e na Teoria de Exemplares, observou-se que o fenômenometafônico se apresentou em maior número na primeira condição de teste,na qual as palavras-alvo foram apresentadas pela primeira vez àsparticipantes. Nesta situação, a frequência de tipo tornou-se maissignificativa do que a própria frequência de ocorrência, uma vez que opadrão no singular é o mais recorrente. Os resultados mostraram que adupla marcação de plural foi produzida em 75,52% das emisso?es. Ametafonia foi encontrada em 8,86% dos dados. Pelas análises acústicas,em 14,58% das produções, foram verificadas vogais com qualidadeintermedia?ria entre a vogal aberta e a fechada, destacando o carátergradiente na produção das vogais, caro aos estudos baseados no uso. Porfim, os resultados ainda mostraram que as mudanças sonoras foneticamentemotivadas, como a redução ou apagamento da vogal postônica [?], bemcomo as mudanças sem motivação fonética, como a analogia ao tipo maisfrequente, atingiram tanto as palavras pouco frequentes quanto as muitofrequentes estabelecidas para o presente estudo.

Vowel Harmony and Disharmony Are Not Equivalent in Learning

General vowel harmony and disharmony rules have comparable formal complexity but differ dramatically in typological frequency and phonetic motivation. Previous studies found no difference in learning between vowel harmony and disharmony; this putative equivalence has been used to discount the view that learners are influenced by substantive learning biases. In the current study, we use a more nuanced test to show that there is a clear difference in learning between vowel harmony and disharmony: learners readily infer a vowel harmony pattern, but not a disharmony pattern. The findings suggest that vowel disharmony is in fact strongly disfavored during learning.

Post-nasal devoicing and the blurring process

This paper addresses one of the most contested issues in phonology: unnatural alternations. First, non-natural phonological processes are subdivided into unmotivated and unnatural. The central topic of the paper is an unnatural process: post-nasal devoicing (PND). I collect thirteen cases of PND and argue that in all reported cases, PND does not derive from a single unnatural sound change (as claimed in some individual accounts of the data), but rather from a combination of three sound changes, each of which is phonetically motivated. I present new evidence showing that the three stages are directly historically attested in the pre-history of Yaghnobi. Based on several discussed cases, I propose a new diachronic model for explaining unnatural phenomena called the Blurring Process and point to its advantages over competing approaches (hypercorrection, perceptual enhancement, and phonetic motivation). The Blurring Process establishes general diachronic conditions for unnatural synchronic processes and can be employed to explain unnatural processes beyond PND. Additionally, I provide a proof establishing the minimal sound changes required for an unmotivated/unnatural alternation to arise. The Blurring Process and Minimal Sound Change Requirement have implications for models of typology within the Channel Bias approach. This paper thus presents a first step toward the ultimate goal of quantifying the influences of Channel Bias on phonological typology.

The phonetics of NCh in Tumbuka and its implications for diachronic change

The phonetic motivation for the synchronic and diachronic development of post-nasal voicing (*NT > ND) is well understood. Less well understood is the phonetic motivation for other common synchronic and diachronic developments from *NT, widely attested in Bantu languages, such as aspiration of the voiceless plosive and subsequent loss of either the nasal or the plosive portion of the sequence: *NT > NTh > Th, Nh. In this paper we first review the existing (scarce) phonetic literature on these developments. Then we present the results of a phonetic study of NC sequences in Tumbuka, a Bantu language where NT > NTh, as a way of exploring how the acoustic and perceptual properties of NTh sequences could motivate the development, found in other Bantu languages, of Th or Nɦ from NTh. We conclude by proposing that a perceptual cue approach, rather than a gestural or other articulatory approach, provides the most persuasive phonetic account, not only of the motivation for post-nasal aspiration of voiceless stops, but also for the instability of nasals and of voiceless stops in the NTh context which leads to other sound changes.

Tone marks as vowel diacritics in two scripts: repurposing tone marks for non-tonal phenomena in Cado and other Southeast Asian languages

Many scripts in Southeast Asia have developed ways of marking tone. When adapting such scripts to write non-tonal languages, language communities often find other uses for these symbols. The case of Cado, an Austroasiatic language of the Katuic sub-branch in Vietnam and Laos, is particularly striking in that they use tone marks as vowel diacritics in two different scripts. Because Cado speakers live on both sides of the Vietnamese-Lao border, they have chosen to use two separate writing systems based on their respective national languages. This paper presents preliminary orthographies for Cado in the Roman and Lao scripts, based on the Vietnamese and Lao orthographies. Cado has no phonation contrast, but it does retain vowel length contrast. Both Cado orthographies adapt tone marks from the Vietnamese and Lao orthographies to distinguish either vowel length or vowel quality respectively. The phonetic motivation for this cross-categorical use of tone marks is discussed, and examples of other orthographies in Southeast Asia that adapt tone marks and other symbols beyond their traditional phonetic category are given and compared with Cado.

Odd conditions

Abstract Since the 19th century linguists have expected to find conditioned sound changes in environments that make phonetic sense: consonants palatalize adjacent to front vowels, back vowels front if a front vowel occurs in the next syllable, stops voice between voiced segments, and so forth. Most conditioned sound changes conform to this expectation, but a surprising number do not. Some of these are well known, as the palatalization of *s before most word-initial consonants in High German. Since there is no obvious explanation for them, such changes are generally ignored in discussions of historical phonology. The result of this practice has been to give the false impression that what appear to be phonetically unmotivated sound changes are rare abnormalities that probably would conform to expectation if we had more information about them. This paper draws attention to examples of conditioning in Austronesian languages in which the phonetic properties of the context appear unrelated to those of the change, and it questions why such changes should occur. Although finding a completely satisfactory explanation has proven difficult, one general conclusion suggested by the data is that native speakers have an intuitive recognition of natural classes that is independent of phonetic motivation.

The phonetic effects of onset complexity on the English syllable

In English, onset segments of the syllable do not participate in the categorical criteria which determine phonological syllable weight, yet they probabilistically impact stress assignment in novel words and influence the composition of weight-based metric verse (Kelly 2004, Ryan 2014). Together these observations suggest a phonetic motivation for the role that onsets play in English’s phonological syllable weight system, investigated here. Using 20 rhyming sets of single syllable words minimally differing in onset material (i.e., rap, trap, strap), this production study replicates results from the literature showing that the addition of segmental material to the onset accompanies a decrease in vowel duration (Gordon 2005, Ryan 2014). Furthermore, results show that the pitch and amplitude maxima of the syllable occur earlier within syllables containing more onset segments. Pitch and amplitude maxima have previously been implicated in perceptually based accounts of syllable weight (Goedemans 1998), and since stimuli were controlled for stress and categorical weight, these results suggest that the phonetic effects observed reflect general acoustic properties of onset complexity in the language. For these reasons, findings reported here suggest that perceptual acoustic effects intrinsic to onset complexity are exploited by the weight system of English despite exclusion from its categorical criteria.

The articulatory dynamics of pre-velar and pre-nasal /æ/-raising in English: An ultrasound study.

Most dialects of North American English exhibit /æ/-raising in some phonological contexts. Both the conditioning environments and the temporal dynamics of the raising vary from region to region. To explore the articulatory basis of /æ/-raising across North American English dialects, acoustic and articulatory data were collected from a regionally diverse group of 24 English speakers from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A method for examining the temporal dynamics of speech directly from ultrasound video using EigenTongues decomposition [Hueber, Aversano, Chollet, Denby, Dreyfus, Oussar, Roussel, and Stone (2007). in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Cascadilla, Honolulu, HI)] was applied to extract principal components of filtered images and linear regression to relate articulatory variation to its acoustic consequences. This technique was used to investigate the tongue movements involved in /æ/ production, in order to compare the tongue gestures involved in the various /æ/-raising patterns, and to relate them to their apparent phonetic motivations (nasalization, voicing, and tongue position).

French loanwords in Vietnamese: the role of input language phonotactics and contrast in loanword adaptation

This study examines the adaptation of French vowels in Vietnamese focusing on adaptation patterns that seem to defy a straightforward analysis based on native phonotactic restrictions or comparison of phonetic input-output similarity. A proper analysis requires reference to knowledge of the input language phonology. In the first case study, we observe that Vietnamese adapters extend the French phonotactic tendencies, i.e., Loi de Position, to loan adaptation productively. Such “intrusion” of L2 phonology knowledge may arise when phonetics underdetermines the adaptation and the adapters look to their knowledge of L2 phonology to arrive at adaptation. It is also notable that the L2 knowledge employed in adaptation is not native-like as the adaptation is not always isomorphic to the French input. In the second case study, the contrast of L2 phonology (/ʁ/ vs. /k/) is neutralized due to an L1 phonological restriction (i.e., no /ʁ/ in Vietnamese coda) but the Vietnamese adaptation systematically retains the contrast in the quality and length difference in the preceding vowel. There is plausible phonetic motivation for this adaptation pattern, but phonetically faithful mapping underdetermines the attested adaptation pattern, and reference to knowledge of L2 phonological contrasts is necessary. These findings illustrate the complexity of the loanword adaptation process, where a variety of different factors including L1 phonological restrictions, phonetic similarity, and L2 phonological knowledge, interact to affect adaptation.

Using ultrasound articulatory signals to investigate the phonetic motivations of English /æ/ tensing

A common simplifying technique in ultrasound studies of variation is to select a single representative frame for each token, sacrificing dynamic information that is often critical for understanding the phonetic motivations of phonological phenomena. We examine the phonetic motivations for tongue body raising in English /æ/ tensing (e.g., Labov et al. 2005) in 23 North American English speakers using phonetically meaningful time-varying articulatory signals extracted directly from ultrasound video. An articulatory measure of /æ/ tenseness is generated using regression to find the linear combination of articulatory principal components (found using EigenTongue Feature Extraction; Hueber et al. 2007) that best accounts for the F2-F1 difference in front vowels. We have previously shown (Carignan et al. 2015) that tensing before /m n/ involves tongue body raising that is timed to the vowel nucleus, whereas tensing before /ɡ ŋ/ involves anticipating the velar closure to different degrees in different dialects. Here, we examine the phonetic motivations for this /æ/ tensing. An articulatory measure of velar fronting shows increased /ɡ/ fronting in speakers who tense /æ/ before /ɡ/, and a purely lingual analog of F1 shows that the effect of nasalization on F1 is much smaller than the phonological effect of pre-nasal /æ/ tensing.