Distinctive Feature Theory Research Articles

Non-Linearity and Feature-Based Phonotactics of Khasibi Arabic Syllable Templates: A Phonological Survey

This paper is intended to explore the study of permissible orders of Khasibi segments in formatting syllable templates (phonotactics). The treatment of phonotactic rules and representations of Khasibi syllables is touched on by means of two influential factors. One of them is the non-linear perspective that is used to cover the hierarchal mapping of the syllables. The other is greater exploitation of the theory of distinctive features to elucidate the phonetic properties of the sound segments of which the syllables are made up. The overall phonontactic scene of Khasibi Arabic is thus integrated by double phonological instruments to attain some sort of comprehensiveness and universality and simultaneously to manifest a degree of idiosyncrasy. Different results are objectively reached, and the most noteworthy one is that two X-position consonants (consonantal clusters) are formed uniquely whereby certain phonological phenomena like geminates and ambi-syllabicity are directly responsible for such a formation.

The road not taken:The Sound Pattern of Russianand the history of contrast in phonology

This article examines a turning point in the history of the theory of phonological distinctive features. In Morris Halle’s (1959)The Sound Pattern of Russian, features are organized into a contrastive hierarchy designed to minimize the number of specified features. Redundancy rules, however, ensure that the resulting underspecification has no real phonological consequences and, in subsequent generative approaches to phonology, contrastive hierarchies were largely abandoned. We explore how Halle’s hierarchy would have been different if it had been based on phonological patterns such as voicing assimilation, and show that this reorganization makes plausible predictions about other aspects of Russian phonology. We conclude by pointing to recent work in which the concept of a contrastive hierarchy has been revived, illustrating the range of phenomena that this theoretical device can account for if minimizing specifications is not the primary concern.

Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian in comparison with the other Slavic languages by Roman Jakobson

Reviewed by: Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian in comparison with the other Slavic languages by Roman Jakobson Ronald I. Kim Roman Jakobson. Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian in comparison with the other Slavic languages. Tr. by Ronald F. Feldstein. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2018. xxiv + 215 pp. ISBN 9780262038690. During the 1920s and 1930s, in the capital of the newly independent Czechoslovak Republic, a Russian émigré and his associates produced a wealth of such innovative studies on the workings of human language that today, nearly a century later, their influence continues to be felt across a range of disciplines. Roman Jakobson, together with his compatriot Nikolai Trubetzkoy, was the central figure in the Prague Linguistic Circle, which built upon the insights of Ferdinand de Saussure to make lasting contributions to structuralist linguistics, poetics, and literary theory. Jakobson’s impact on fields such as linguistic anthropology and semiotics remains palpable down to the present, and his theory of distinctive features and understanding of linguistic changes not as isolated events, but as changes to whole systems inspired many leading minds of the postwar generation, from Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, the founders of generative linguistics, to Uriel Weinreich and William Labov, who pioneered the study of language in its social context. Many of his observations were drawn from Russian and other Slavic languages, of which Jakobson had a legendary command, establishing his enduring status as a towering figure of Slavic studies. Jakobson is mostly known among linguists today for his postwar publications written in English, which along with his prewar œuvre are collected in the nine-volume Selected writings (Jakobson 1962–2014). The first of these contains the work under review, the second monograph composed by Jakobson after his celebrated study of Russian and Czech poetics (Jakobson 1923). But whereas the latter was printed and remains available in the original Russian, Remarks suffered a less fortunate fate: after the Russian manuscript was destroyed in 1939 during the German occupation of Brno, it survived only in the French translation of Louis Brun, published in Prague in 1929 as the second volume of the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague. The precipitous decline in knowledge of French among Slavicists (and linguists at large) has had the consequence that this major achievement of Jakobson’s Prague years has tended to be somewhat overlooked, its analyses often known from citations in Jakobson’s later publications. [End Page 81] The present edition owes its appearance to the efforts of Ronald F. Feldstein, a leading figure in Jakobsonian linguistics who has written extensively on many of the topics addressed in Remarks. Feldstein, who also collaborated on the translation of V. M. Illič-Svityč’s classic Nominal accentuation in Baltic and Slavic (1979), has skillfully rendered Brun’s French into idiomatic English academic prose, while striving to maintain (and, in select instances, restore) as much as possible of the sense of the lost Russian original. Given Jakobson’s famously terse prose and the complexity of the concepts discussed, Feldstein has wisely decided to include annotations following each chapter, rather than after each section or all together at the end; this arrangement greatly facilitates the reader’s task, without unduly interrupting the flow of the text. The volume begins with a foreword by Feldstein placing Remarks in the context of Jakobson’s scholarship (xiii–xvii) and orientational “Notes on Early Common Slavic to Late Common Slavic” (xix–xxi), followed by Jakobson’s own preface (xxiii). The first two chapters, “Basic principles” (1–8; Feldstein’s annotations 9–13) and “Remarks on current issues of comparative historical phonology” (15–21; 22–24), introduce the main concepts used throughout the rest of the study, including phonemes, phonological correlations and disjunctions, archiphonemes, the relation between synchrony and diachrony, and “laws” linking correlations in phonological change. Chapter 3 is devoted to “Remarks on the evolution of the phonological system of Proto-Slavic” (25–43; 44–57), focusing on the palatalization of consonants and treatment of diphthongs as crucial events in the trend toward rising sonority and syllabic synharmony. Jakobson then turns to a perennial problem of Slavic historical phonology in Chapter 4, “The Proto-East-Slavic change...

Zum Problem der Palatalisierung und Depalatalisierung aus merkmalsgeometrischer Sicht am Beispiel des Russischen

Summary Although the theory of distinctive features, developed in SPE by Chomsky & Halle (1968) and later on reformed by Sagey (1986) and McCarthy (1988), provides a general description of phonemes from an articulatory point of view, it displays significant uncertainties when employed for Russian. These could be summarized in two points: first, which feature leads to a distinctive palatalization correlation of the phonemes and, second, which feature triggers the phonological processes of palatalization and depalatalization assimilation. In this work, these issues are discussed and clarified by means of the feature-geometric description of the two processes for Russian. Then, a differentiated description of the named phonological processes from a feature-geometric point of view is suggested and a differentiated phoneme inventory of Russian is developed.

The Sound System of Baghdadi Arabic in the Light of Distinctive Feature Theory

This paper is an attempt to look at the sound system of Baghdadi Arabic in view of the Distinctive Feature Theory, in order to see how far such a theory would be applicable to the language variety being dealt with in this paper. The main purpose ,here, is to see how far is it possible to group the sounds of Baghdadi Arabic into classes according to their phonetic (distinctive) properties. Thus, on one hand, the paper is meant to deal with the sounds of Baghdadi Arabic in terms of Trubetzkoy's distinctive oppositions, using the method of contrasting the classes of sounds according to such oppositions.

Denasalisation in the spoken French of Ijebu undergraduate French learners in selected universities in south West of Nigeria

Denasalisation is a lexical phenomenon brought into play during the process of lexicalisation while nasalisation is a natural process which occurs when an oral sound is modified in the environment of an adjacent nasal sound. Little attention is paid to the former because phonologists admit that nasalisation is more natural during speech production. This paper, therefore, examined denasalisation in the spoken French of 50 Ijebu Undergraduate French Learners (IUFLs) in Selected Universities in South West of Nigeria with a view to establishing instances of denasalisation in their spoken French. Data collection for this study was through tape-recording of participants’ production of 30 sentences containing French vowel and consonant sounds. Goldsmith’s Autosegmental phonology blended with distinctive feature theory was used to analyse instances of denasalisation in the data collected. The study revealed instances of denasalisation of nasal sounds at initial and final positions in the spoken French of the IUFLs.Keywords: IUFLs, Denasalisation, Autosegmental Phonology, French as Foreign language

Cloning the linguistic twin sisters: A Comparative Linguistic Study of French and Yoruba Languages

Phonology can be defined as the study of sound patterns and their meanings both within and across languages. There are innumerable appraisals of scholars on the phonology of French and Yorùbá languages as twin-sisters with little attention paid to the distinctive variance in their phonemic features. Premised on distinctive feature theory which identifies a set of features adequate for describing the segmental contrasts and phonologically important segment groups observed in languages, this study interrogates the differences in the types of syllables, formation of syllables and the components of the syllabic structures in French and Yorùbá languages with a view to identifying how these two languages negotiate their divergence in phonology and morphology. The study reveals that, that two languages are genetically related does not mean that the two will always share the same phonological, morphological, syntactic and grammatical similarities at all times. This study argues that the only workable way out of phonological, morphological, syntactic and grammatical difficulties for Yorubaphone French language learners is not via cloning the linguistic twin sisters.

조음자질을 이용한 한국인 학습자의 영어 발화 자동 발음 평가

This paper aims to propose articulatory features as novel predictors for automatic pronunciation assessment of English produced by Korean learners. Based on the distinctive feature theory, where phonemes are represented as a set of articulatory/phonetic properties, we propose articulatory Goodness-Of-Pronunciation(aGOP) features in terms of the corresponding articulatory attributes, such as nasal, sonorant, anterior, etc. An English speech corpus spoken by Korean learners is used in the assessment modeling. In our system, learners' speech is forced aligned and recognized by using the acoustic and pronunciation models derived from the WSJ corpus (native North American speech) and the CMU pronouncing dictionary, respectively. In order to compute aGOP features, articulatory models are trained for the corresponding articulatory attributes. In addition to the proposed features, various features which are divided into four categories such as RATE, SEGMENT, SILENCE, and GOP are applied as a baseline. In order to enhance the assessment modeling performance and investigate the weights of the salient features, relevant features are extracted by using Best Subset Selection(BSS). The results show that the proposed model using aGOP features outperform the baseline. In addition, analysis of relevant features extracted by BSS reveals that the selected aGOP features represent the salient variations of Korean learners of English. The results are expected to be effective for automatic pronunciation error detection, as well.

Autosegmental Representation of Epenthesis in the Spoken French of Ijebu Undergraduate French Learners in Selected Universities in South-West of Nigeria

Insertion of vowels and consonants is a phonological process in language. Existing studies have examined vowel insertion in several languages and dialects with little attention paid to the spoken French of Ijebu Undergraduates. Therefore, this paper examined vowel insertion in the spoken French of 50 Ijebu Undergraduate French Learners (IUFLs) in Selected Universities in South West of Nigeria. The data collection for this study was through tape-recording of participants’ production of 30 sentences containing both French vowel and consonant sounds while Goldsmith’s Autosegmental phonology blended with distinctive feature theory was used to analyse instances of insertion in the data collected such as i-epenthetic and u-epenthetic at the initial, medial and final positions in the spoken French of IUFLs.Keywords: IUFLs, Epenthensis, Ijebu dialect, Autosegmental phonology

Feature conditioned resolution of hiatus in Chichewa

This article examines the morphophonological environments in which vowel sequences occur in Chichewa and explains the synchronic hiatus resolution strategies that are employed in this language to remove these dispreferred vowel cluster configurations. This investigation demonstrates that the major motivation for resolving hiatal configurations in Chichewa, like in many other Bantu languages, is to maintain the preferred canonical consonant-vowel (CV) syllable structure. The analysis of data used in this study is mainly couched within the theoretical explications of Optimality Theory (OT) as enunciated by Prince and Smolensky (1991, 1993), McCarthy and Prince (1999), Archaengeli and Langendoen (1997), and Kager (1999); Distinctive Feature Theory as discussed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) as well as the generative CV-phonology model of syllable structure as discussed by Clements and Keyser (1983). This article argues for vowel-feature sensitive repair of hiatal configuration in Chichewa. Observing such a vowel-feature sensitive based repair of hiatal configuration analysis, which this article argues to be largely ONSET motivated/triggered and the featural properties of the phonological structures of the language under study, the language's reactions to such dispreferred vowel clusters and its phonotactics are here examined. Repair strategies for such hiatus configurations are discussed, including glide formation, consonantal and/or glide insertions, vowel deletion and coalescence. The analysis adopted here implies that the resolution hiatus arises from incompatibilities in the features of the vowels straddling a word boundary. It argues that these repair strategies are largely motivated by language internal constraint ranking systems which in many Bantu languages seem to largely prefer the preservation of [−] features over [+] features, i.e. the ranking [−F’]≫[+F’].

Speech recognition informed by distinctive feature theory: The featurally underspecified Lexicon model and its implications

We present a speech recognition engine that implements the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon calculus (FUL). The FUL model defines an inventory of privative phonological features that is necessary and sufficient to describe contrasts between phonemes in any language in the world. The model also defines conditions for comparing feature bundles recovered from the signal with segments defined in the lexicon: a feature may MATCH (the feature is present in both the signal and the lexicon), it may MISMATCH (the feature in the signal is impossible in tokens of the segment in the lexicon, e.g. when a stop-burst, which indicates the [PLOSIVE] feature, is compared with a segment carrying the [CONTINUANT] feature in the lexicon), or it may provoke a NOMISMATCH response when the feature in the signal is not part of the segment in the lexicon. This matching mechanism also accounts for asymmetries as they are observed in natural speech, as [CORONAL] assimilates to [LABIAL] but not the other way around. The engine computes distances to neighboring words according to a coherence measure to simulate co-activation in the lexicon. We will demonstrate online the operation of this engine in English and German.

Towards a Mental Representation of Vowel Height in SSBE Speakers

Vigorous debate in phonetics and phonology has focused on the structure and cognitive foundation of distinctive feature theory, as well as on the definition and representation of features themselves. In particular, we show in Section 1 that, although vowel height has long been the object of close scrutiny, research on the three- or more- tiered height representation of vowels in the phonology of English remains inconclusive. Section 2 reports on the rationale and methodology of a sound-symbolism experiment designed to evaluate the implicit phonological knowledge that English native speakers have of vowel height differences. In Section 3 we tabulate results and argue in Section 4 that their intuitive understanding of such differences is best accounted for in terms of a three- tiered height axis.

<i>The sound structure of English: An introduction</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The sound structure of English: An introduction Marie Ploquin Chris McCully. 2009. The sound structure of English: An introduction. Cambridge Introductions to the English Language. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. viii + 233. The sound structure of English is meant to be an introductory textbook in phonetics and phonology requiring no prior knowledge of the topic. The eleven chapters of the book take the beginner from noticing contrastive features of consonants to understanding phonological theories. The text is reader-friendly and engages the student with active learning techniques, such as easy analyses, exercises, and analogies. Each chapter starts with a useful summary of notions and ends with exercises, a list of key terms, and further reading suggestions. Chapter 1, the introduction, begins with a discussion of the difference between the written and the spoken systems of English, for instance by drawing the reader’s attention to homophones and digraphs pronounced as single sounds. It continues with the notions of speech as a system, an explanation of the difference between accent and dialect, as well as phonology and phonetics. Chapters 2 to 4 deal with consonants. Chapter 2 presents a thorough discussion of contrastiveness and introduces the notions of sounds and noise. The discussion leads to the IPA, minimal pairs, sound distribution, and to the idea of consonant classification, which is the subject of Chapter 3. In this chapter, the author takes the reader through the notions of voicing, place, and manner to (re)create a consonant classification. Chapter 4 deals with the distribution of consonants, namely complementary, contrastive, or restricted distributions, and the concept of allophony. These notions are then used to identify whether the glottal stop is an allophone of /t/. The syllable is the topic covered in Chapters 5 to 7. As the basic structure (onset, nucleus, coda) of the syllable was introduced in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 takes a closer look at vowels as the nucleus of the syllable and their distribution in stressed and unstressed syllables. This leads to the discussion of monosyllabic content words and function words (referred to as “lexical” and “non-lexical” here). This chapter ends with a discussion of stress in compound nouns as well as primary and secondary [End Page 162] stress. Chapter 6 resumes the discussion of syllable structure to introduce the notions of rhyme and sonority. The chapter concludes with an overview of the typology and universals of syllable structure. The last chapter on syllables takes the discussion of syllable structure further by elaborating on the structure of the onset, the coda, and the nucleus. This chapter also discusses light and heavy syllables and explains the Principle of Maximal Onset and the notion of ambisyllabicity. Chapters 8 to 10 focus on vowels. A substantial part of Chapters 8 and 9 is used to establish the inventory of short and long vowels, respectively. In Chapter 8, the comparison of thirteen varieties of English is used to reconstruct the vowel trapezium. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the phonological status of the schwa. Chapter 9 deals with long vowels, including diphthongs. It resumes the discussion of long vowels and diphthongs having two X-slots in the nucleus, introduces the notion of “pure vowels” and the question of whether the second X should be considered a consonant or a vowel. Once the inventory of long vowels is established, the production of diphthongs is looked at across a few varieties of English. The chapter ends with a brief description of triphthongs. Chapter 10 presents diachronic and synchronic variations on vowels, covering topics such as the Great Vowel Shift, splits and mergers, asymmetries, and rhoticity. The final chapter of the book covers several theoretical approaches to the study of the sound structure of English, namely generative phonology, Distinctive Feature Theory, and Optimality Theory. Guiding the reader through a discussion of coda-final consonants, the author introduces the notion and use of distinctive features. This leads him to introduce, with examples of assimilation, the notions of phonological rules and of generative phonology. At the end of the chapter, Optimality Theory is applied in three case studies: neutralisation (syllable-final consonant devoicing in Dutch), onsets (structure of syllable onsets in English), and...

Normalized recognition of speech and audio events

An invariant feature is a nonlinear projection whose output shows less intra-class variability than its input. In machine learning, invariant features may be given a priori, on the basis of scientific knowledge, or they may be learned using feature selection algorithms. In the task of acoustic feature extraction for automatic speech recognition, for example, a candidate for apriori invariance is provided by the theory of phonological distinctive features, which specifies that any given distinctive feature should correspond to a fixed acoustic correlate (a fixed classification boundary between positive and negative examples), regardless of context. A learned invariance might, instead, project each phoneme into a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture supervector space, and in the high-dimensional space, learn an inter-phoneme distance metric that minimizes the distances among examples of any given phoneme. Results are available for both tasks, but it is not easy to compare them: learned invariance outperforms a priori invariance for some task definitions, and underperforms for other task definitions. As future work, we propose that the a priori invariance might be used to regularize a learned invariance projection.

The emergence of distinctive features (review)

Reviewed by: The emergence of distinctive features Abigail C. Cohn The emergence of distinctive features. By Jeff Mielke . (Oxford studies in typology and linguistic theory.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii, 280. ISBN 9780199233373. $39.95. A fundamental question in phonology is the role of distinctive features in characterizing phonological patterns of the world's languages in terms of their inventories, phonotactics, and alternations. One view widely held since the 1960s is that distinctive features, characterized in terms of the phonetic capabilities of humans, are universal, and that their universality is explained by their being innate: The total set of features is identical with the set of phonetic properties that can in principle be controlled in speech; they represent the phonetic capabilities of man, and we would assume, are therefore the same for all languages. (Chomsky & Halle 1968:294-95) The significant linguistic universals are those that must be assumed to be available to the child learning a language as an a priori, innate endowment. (Chomsky & Halle 1968:4) Under this view, so-called NATURAL CLASSES—widely attested crosslinguistic patterns characterized in terms of shared phonetic properties—are accounted for by the conjunction of small sets of innate distinctive features. In The emergence of distinctive features, Jeff Mielke challenges this view in a both provocative and compelling way. Based on a database of phonological alternations culled from an extensive set of descriptive grammars, he argues that an innate distinctive feature theory is not adequate and duplicates other independently needed explanations. He argues that an emergent feature theory, where 'features are abstract categories based on generalizations that emerge from phonological patterns' (9), offers a better account of natural and unnatural classes. Overall, the book serves as a challenge to the widely held view of distinctive features as innate. It sets an agenda for testing the viability of phonologically active features as emergent, which at this stage is more a programmatic alternative rather than a full-fledged theory, and calls upon all of us to rethink the nature of phonological primitives. This work (a revised version of the author's 2004 dissertation) consists of eight chapters (192 pages), three appendices, and an extensive set of references, as well as general, language, and feature indices (82 pages); together they make the book user-friendly and accessible. Well written and carefully edited (with almost no typos!), this book is available in both hardback and paperback, thus increasing the accessibility of this significant and timely work. It is complemented by an online searchable database of phonological alternations that M constructed for the study (available at http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~jmielke/pbase/index.html). The organization of the book blends discussion of the central issues and themes with the empirical foundation of the study. Chs. 1 and 2 frame the issues surrounding distinctive feature theory, asking whether an innate or emergent theory is more adequate. Ch. 5 amplifies on what an emergent theory would look like, and Ch. 8 proposes a general model for the emergence of linguistic structure. Ch. 3 provides the methodology for the database survey, while Chs. 4, 6, and 7 present results from the study. The book and accompanying database will be of interest to students and scholars of phonology, as well as those interested in broader themes about the nature of linguistic knowledge and sources of explanation in linguistics. The main argument of the book is as follows: The purpose of this book is to argue that there are many sound patterns that innate features cannot account for, that there is no direct evidence for innate features, and that observations about sound patterns are better accounted for by emergent feature theory, a theory of how the development of sound patterns leads to the recurrence of particular groups of sounds, or natural classes. (2) To address the multiple uses of the term 'natural class', M introduces PHONOLOGICALLY ACTIVE CLASSES—classes of sounds that are observed to pattern together phonologically. Thus, Mreframes the central question: What is or are the most appropriate explanations for the phonologically active [End Page 647] classes across the world's languages? A further terminological distinction that would also be useful is between UNIVERSAL and INNATE, which Mat...

An argument for the feature [dental

Several well-known processes from English phonology which require reference to the alveolar obstruents (/t d s z/) are considered from the point of view of distinctive feature theory. It is argued that this natural class necessitates the feature [−dental] in order to account for the fact that dental fricatives (/ θ ð/) are inert. In conclusion, the cross-linguistic predictions of the present analysis are discussed.

English voicing in dimensional theory

Assuming a framework of privative features, this paper interprets two apparently disparate phenomena in English phonology as structurally related: the lexically specific voicing of fricatives in plural nouns like wives or thieves and the prosodically governed “flapping” of medial /t/ (and /d/) in North American varieties – which we claim is itself not a rule per se, but rather a consequence of the laryngeal weakening of fortis /t/ in interaction with speech-rate determined segmental abbreviation. Taking as our point of departure the Dimensional Theory of laryngeal representation developed by Avery and Idsardi [Avery, Peter, Idsardi, William, 2001. Laryngeal dimensions, completion and enhancement. In: Alan Hall, T., (Ed.), Distinctive Feature Theory. de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 41–70], along with their assumption that English marks voiceless obstruents but not voiced ones [Iverson, Gregory K., Salmons, Joseph C., 1995. Aspiration and laryngeal representation in Germanic. Phonology 12, 369–396], we find that an unexpected connection between fricative voicing and coronal flapping emerges from the interplay of familiar phonemic and phonetic factors in the phonological system.

Perception of Fricatives by Dutch and English Speakers

Two speech perception experiments explored physical and linguistic bases of similarity. Because phonological features are grounded in similarity, these experiments were thus an exploration of bases of distinctive features. Experiment 1 found that Dutch listeners rated (s) and () as more similar to each other than did American English listeners. We attributed this to a pattern of alternation in Dutch phonology involving these sounds. Experiment 1 also found that Dutch listeners rated () and (s), and () and () as more similar to each other than did American English listeners. We attributed this to lack of () in Dutch inventory of native sounds. Experiment 2 found that Dutch and American English listeners did not signficantly differ from each other in a speeded discrimination task with same stimuli as experiment 1. Reaction times in experiment 2 were highly correlated with rating data of experiment 1 (r = -.86 to -.96) indicating that general pattern of response in experiment 1 was based on auditory similarity, with language-specific effects superimposed on general pattern. We conclude that similarity, a base of phonological features, is comprised of three components: (1) auditory similarity, (2) inventory, and (3) language- specific patterns of alternation. This is a paper about similarity. By phonetic we mean a psychological phenomenon - something like the subjective experience of linguistic sound - which is no doubt related to physically measureable acoustic, visual, or motor aspects of speech sounds; but which also may be derived from listener's experience of sounds of language. We will argue on basis of data from two cross-linguistic speech perception experiments, that similarity is a product both of physical aspects of sounds and of linguistic patterning of sounds. This research is relevant to distinctive feature theory because phonological features are grounded in similarity. Phonetic similarity is relevant in poetic use of language to determine near-rhymes (Steriade, 2003), sound change is influenced by perceptibility of sounds involved in change (Hume & Johnson, 2001), and synchronic phonological patterns

Ambivalence and ambiguity in laterals and nasals

Ambivalent segments are speech sounds whose cross-linguistic patterning is especially variable, creating contradictions for theories of universal distinctive features. This paper examines lateral liquids, whose [continuant] specification has been the subject of controversy because of their ability to pattern both with continuants and with non-continuants, and because phonetically they are situated in the contested ground between two different articulatory definitions for the feature [continuant]. Evidence from a survey of sound patterns in 561 languages shows that lateral liquids, like nasals, pattern with continuants about as often as with non-continuants. Ambivalent phonological behaviour is argued to be natural and expected for phonetically ambiguous segments in a theory of emergent distinctive features where features are the result of sound patterns, rather than the other way around.

Sound Mutations: The Morphophonology of Chaha (review)

Reviewed by: Sound mutations: The morphophonology of Chaha by Degif Petros Banksira Eugene Buckley Sound mutations: The morphophonology of Chaha. By Degif Petros Banksira. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. xxxi, 332. ISBN 9027225648. $90 (Hb). This book, which grew out of the author’s 1997 dissertation from the University of Québec at Montréal, is a thorough discussion and analysis of certain aspects of the phonology and morphology of Chaha, a member of the Gurage group of Ethiopian Semitic languages. The phonological discussion focuses on matters of featural representation and distribution for which Chaha is an exceptionally rich source; the morphological discussion is restricted to a set of suffixes and clitics that mark verb agreement. The facts of each phenomenon are presented clearly before turning to a more formal analysis, easing the way for anyone seeking primarily to explore the typological data. The theoretical devices that Banksira deploys involve well-known approaches, in particular radical underspecification and distributed morphology, so that readers from a variety of perspectives should find the material accessible and of lasting value. Chaha is famous in the phonological literature for the palatalization or labialization of consonants in the stem, subject to interesting cooccurrence and directionality effects, and illustrates the autosegmental behavior of place features in a striking way (cf. John McCarthy, ‘Consonantal morphology in the Chaha verb’, WCCFL 2.176–88, 1983). This will be most familiar to some readers as the expression of inflectional suffixes, for example, nɨk’ɨm, nɨk’jɨm, nɨk’ɨmw ‘collect!’ in masculine singular, feminine singular, and impersonal forms. Similar effects, often in combination, are found throughout the morphology, such as the imperative mət’ɨs and participle mwɨt’ɨʃ ‘to break at once by pulling’. In contrast to McCarthy’s use of [– back, + high] and [+ round] as the operative features, B argues for a solution with the [– back] element /I/ but also a single element /U/ which is both [round] and [high] since labialization entails palatalization. Another particularly interesting aspect of the language, one that is extensively discussed by B, is the paradigmatic alternation between voiced and voiceless consonants, or fricatives and stops, that historically derives from a pattern of gemination (e.g. jussive -əgɨr and perfective akər ‘to raise cattle’). The alternations, which involve pairs of segments typically involved in lenition—B analyzes them as two strengthening processes, parallel to historical gemination—depend as well on the features of the following (nonadjacent) consonant, leading to interesting issues of multiple linking of features and action at a distance. By abstracting away from contexts of strengthening and relying on the autosegmental independence of the labialization and palatalization elements, B reduces the surface inventory of thirty-eight consonants to just sixteen underlying phonemes. With its exhaustive data and careful attention to the analysis of wide-ranging facts, this book is essential for anyone interested in the morphophonology of Ethiopian Semitic and is of considerable value for its general contributions to rule typology and distinctive feature theory. Eugene Buckley University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America