Segmental Tiers Research Articles

Revisiting Kabardian Phonology: A Syllabic Analysis

This paper provides an autosegmental analysis of phonological alternations in Kabardian, an Abhkaz-Adyghean language. It illustrates how several phonological re-write rules, postulated in Colarusso’s (1992) phonological analysis of Kabardian which, in some cases, lacks adequate explanation, may be uniformly reinterpreted as instances of mapping between the segmental tier and the skeletal tier in an autosegmental approach. In doing so, this paper illustrates a case where the skeletal make-up of a language may be dominant over underlying segments and be crucial in determining the output forms of a language, a process which may be translated into high-ranking constraints under a constraint-based framework. This paper, therefore, provides a more economical and explanatorily adequate analysis of Kabardian phonological alternations.

Stem configurations, lexical items, and phonological words in Maltese

Maltese is the 'national' language of the people in the sister-islands of Malta and Gozo. Originally Arabic, Maltese vocabulary has been massively expanded by borrowings from Romance (Sicilian/Italian), and more recently English. Influential contributions in (post)generative phonology and Optimality Theory claim that Maltese phonology is based on the interaction of (Palestinian Arabic type) stress assignment with syncope, and cyclic application of rules/constraints. This approach fails in some cases for Arabic Maltese, and is inoperative for borrowed vocabulary. I argue for distributing morphological constituents in three domains. The stem-domain heads a radical base, to which a preformative morph may be incorporated, and inflectional circumfixes. The Lexical-item domain heads the stem-node to which (in)direct pronominal objects may be concatenated. Clitics are adjoined to the phonological-word domain. All exponents are mapped on the linearized segmental tier. Trochaic stems satisfying morpho-lexical constraints are built in a pre-lexical phase. Vocalism is underlyingly specified or assigned by default, including ‘reverse-imāla’. In a lexical phase, OCP and Licensing shape syllabic stem-profiles to satisfy morpho-prosodic constraints. In the post-lexical phase, surface forms are generated by application of phonological processes: stress assignment, vowel length and quality, voice alteration in obstruents. A model of 'Weak CV Phonology', distantly related to Strict CV Phonology, is drawn up. Segmental representations are analyzed in monovalent elements. Maltese has often been presented as a 'mixed' language with two strata of vocabulary and two morphologies: root-and-pattern, non-concatenative for template-bound vocabulary, concatenative for loan-words. I claim that Maltese consistently requires templatic, concatenative and word-based morphology.

Tonal Alignment in Irish Dialects

A comparison of the contour alignment of nuclear and initial prenuclear accents was carried out for the Irish dialects of Gaoth Dobhair in Ulster (GD-U) and Cois Fharraige in Connaught (CF-C). This was done across conditions where the number of unstressed syllables following the nuclear and preceding the initial prenuclear accents was varied from 2-0. This tests a variable peak hypothesis prompted by findings for other languages, that peak timing drifts as a function of the number of syllables preceding (the prenuclear) and following (the nuclear) accent. These data also test a second hypothesis that the L*+H dominant accent of GD-U might be viewed as being underlyingly the same as the dominant H* or H*+L accent of the CF-C dialect. According to this realignment hypothesis, the difference between these Ulster and Connaught dialects lies in the way that the melodic tier is aligned to the segmental tier: GD-U would be viewed as having a delayed realization of the peak relative to the Connaught dialect. Results do not support the variable peak hypothesis for Irish, as in either dialect, the peak appeared to be rather fixed across the three conditions examined (though not necessarily identical for prenuclear and nuclear positions). The results also militate against the realignment hypothesis, which rather than providing a more simple unifying account, would greatly complicate it. One reason is that there is a peak timing difference between the nuclear and prenuclear accents of CF-C, not mirrored in GD-U. Furthermore, even if one were to limit consideration to a single (e.g., prenuclear) context, a simple realignment of the accents in one dialect does not generate the appropriate contour in the other.

Segments with Inherently Falling Sonority

Abstract. This paper deals with an inconsistency in the application of the concept of sonority in such non‐linear approaches to phonology that make use of both the segmental tier and the skeletal tier. I will argue that these approaches are forced to take the skeletal tier as the relevant level for the application of sonority. However, since long vowels occupy two positions on this tier, they form a sonority plateau, a configuration that is generally forbidden by basic sonority constraints. To solve this inconsistency, I will propose the concept of segments with inherently falling sonority. In addition, I will consider other candidates for elements with inherently uneven sonority. The intricacies of sonority will be discussed considering German as an example, following the assumption that phonological concepts, despite having a universal core, are characterised by language‐specific adjustments.

Evidence for separate tonal and segmental tiers in the lexical specification of words: A case study of a brain-damaged Chinese speaker

We present an acoustic study of segmental and prosodic properties of words produced by a female speaker of Chinese with left-hemisphere brain damage. We measured the location of the point vowels /a, e, ə, i, y, o, u/ and determined their separation in the vowel plane, and their perceptual distinctivity. Similarly, the acoustic properties of the four lexical tones were measured in the F0 × time space. The data for our brain-damaged speaker were compared with those of a healthy control speaker. Results show that the patient's vowels hardly suffered from her lesion (relative to the vowel dispersion in the healthy control speaker), but that the identifiability of the four lexical tones was greatly compromised. These findings show that the tonal errors in aphasic speech behave independently of the segmental errors, even though both serve to maintain lexical contrasts in Chinese, and are therefore part of the lexical specification of Chinese words. The present study suggests that the specification of segmental and tonal aspects of lexical entries in Chinese, and in tone languages in general, are located or processed separately in the brain.

Evidence for separate tonal and segmental tiers in the lexical specification of words: A production and perception study of a brain-damaged Chinese speaker

Evidence for separate tonal and segmental tiers in the lexical specification of words: A production and perception study of a brain-damaged Chinese speaker

Cantonese consonantal development: towards a nonlinear account.

Descriptions of the development of prosodic and segmental tiers of children's phonological systems have been derived from investigations of the development of English. This paper provides a preliminary description of phonological tier development in Cantonese-speaking children. Eight children, (two each at 1;7, 2;6, 3;5, and 4;2 years) named 95 pictures. The data were analysed for word, syllable, onset-rime, skeletal, and segmental tiers. The results suggested a developmental order in the acquisition of hierarchical features. Decreasing order of accuracy of the tiers was word = syllable > onset-rime = skeletal > segmental. A model of feature geometry was adopted to describe the acquisition of features. An interesting finding is the way the laryngeal feature (aspiration) was combined with place contrasts one at a time rather than all at once.

Metrical structure in planning the production of spoken words.

According to most models of speech production, the planning of spoken words involves the independent retrieval of segments and metrical frames followed by segment-to-frame association. In some models, the metrical frame includes a specification of the number and ordering of consonants and vowels, but in the word-form encoding by activation and verification (WEAVER) model (A. Roelofs, 1997), the frame specifies only the stress pattern across syllables. In 6 implicit priming experiments, on each trial, participants produced 1 word out of a small set as quickly as possible. In homogeneous sets, the response words shared word-initial segments, whereas in heterogeneous sets, they did not. Priming effects from shared segments depended on all response words having the same number of syllables and stress pattem, but not on their having the same number of consonants and vowels. No priming occurred when the response words had only the same metrical frame but shared no segments. Computer simulations demonstrated that WEAVER accounts for the findings. Most theories of word production assume that the phonological representations constructed in planning utterances include separate representations of the segmental content of words and of their metrical properties, such as their syllable structure and stress pattern. This view is compatible with current linguistic theory, which allocates segmental and metrical information on separate representational tiers (e.g., Goldsmith, 1990; Kenstowicz, 1994). In addition, psycholinguistic models often contend that during speech planning, the metrical and segmental tiers are first retrieved, or generated, independently of each other and later combined (see Levelt, 1989, for an overview). Most of the evidence for this view comes from analyses of speech errors. The argument runs roughly as follows (see, for instance, Meyer, 1992, for a more extensive discussion). Speakers often commit sound errors, in which the intended and the actual utterance differ in a speech fragment smaller than a complete morpheme. Usually, these fragments correspond to individual segments or, less often, to clusters of two adjacent segments. This shows that, during speech planning, stored form representations are decomposed into their segments. Misplaced segments typically move from their target positions to corresponding positions in new syllables, for instance from one syllable onset (the prevocalic part of a

Vowel harmony, neutral vowels and autosegmental theory

A revision of McCarthy's analysis of Montaiies vowel harmony is proposed in which autosegmental tiers constitute a separate dimension of the representation whose feature specifications can be given independently. Segments which do not undergo harmony (including neutral vowels) are specified on the segmental tier and are not affected when a word is associated to the autosegmental tier (cf. Booij (1984)). By allowing rules to make reference to the specification of a whole tier within a harmony domain it is possible to simplify McCarthy's treatment considerably, in particular dispensing with his ‘delinking’ rule and consequently his 'Duke of York' analysis. It is also not necessary to invoke extrinsic rule ordering.

The Spreading Hand Autosegment of American Sign Language

The Hand Tier (HT) model presented here can account for sign language sign structure by showing hand configuration associating with location and movement on the segmental tier. This model preserves the structural and functional importance of location, movement, and hand configuration, and reveals special properties of the hand tier, which spreads across signs according to its own timetable. Structural relationships among signs in the lexicon, as well as productive phonological and morphological rules, provide evidence that this model can account for surface data in a way that reveals key information about the core of ASL structure.

The treatment of long vowels in word games

In the current nonlinear model of CV phonology (Clements & Keyser 1983), phonological representations are organised into several levels or tiers, of which the following three are the most significant: the central CV tier (skeleton), whose units, C and V, are autosegmentally associated with the units of the syllable tier on one end and with the units of the segmental tier on the other. The segmental tier itself is organised into subtiers of distinctive features; the internal structure of the syllable tier is subject to considerable debate in the literature. In addition, CV-level units may be linked to melodies on separate autosegmental tiers in the case of suprasegmental phenomena like tone and vowel harmony.