From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Mon Nov  5 15:57:22 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 08:57:22 -0700
Subject: Christine Rinne: CFP GLAC-8 - Eighth Germanic Linguistics Annual
 Conference
Message-ID: <MON.5.NOV.2001.085722.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

 From Christine Rinne <crinne at INDIANA.EDU>:

Call for papers

GLAC-8: EIGHTH GERMANIC LINGUISTICS ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Indiana University, Bloomington

April 26-28, 2002

*     *     *     *     *

Featured Speakers:

Richard M. Hogg, University of Manchester
Joan Maling, Brandeis University
Susan Pintzuk, University of York

*     *     *     *     *

We invite colleagues at all levels (faculty, graduate students, and
independent scholars) to submit abstracts for 30-minute papers on any
linguistic or philological aspect of any historical or modern Germanic
language or dialect, including English (to the Early Modern period) and
the extra-territorial varieties. Papers from a range of linguistic
subfields, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
sociolinguistics, language acquisition, contact, and change, as well as
differing theoretical approaches, are welcome.

Papers will be selected for the program by a broad-based committee in a
double-blind process. Please send to the address below a one-page abstract
in a 12-point font, ready to be reproduced photographically. More
information on abstracts may be found at the conference web site listed
below. Submissions must be received by January 2, 2002. Notifications of
acceptance will be distributed by February 1,
2002.

GLAC-8
Department of Germanic Studies
Ballantine Hall 644
1020 East Kirkwood Avenue
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
U.S.A.

More information about abstracts and other aspects of the conference are
available at the conference web site, at
<http://www.indiana.edu/~glac8/index4.htm>. Or contact the conference
organizers, Robert D. Fulk (Dept. of English) and Rex A. Sprouse (Dept. of
Germanic Studies), at <glac8 at indiana.edu>.


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Fri Nov 16 20:56:32 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 13:56:32 -0700
Subject: Martha McGinnis: phonological arguments for late insertion?
Message-ID: <FRI.16.NOV.2001.135632.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

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From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Fri Nov 16 21:30:54 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 14:30:54 -0700
Subject: Piotr Banski: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply
 to Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <FRI.16.NOV.2001.143054.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> I'm looking for references to anything that gives phonological
> arguments <italic>for</italic> late insertion or, specifically,
> <italic>against</italic> Lexical Phonology.

How about looking at clitic constructions which undergo 'lexical'
processes, although they are created *after* syntax?

Obviously, you can postulate that some lexical rules reapply *in the very
same fashion* in *restricted contexts* in the postsyntactic component, or
postulate some kind of equivalent of the late Clitic Group in order to
make such contexts appear less restricted (and hence more natural for
postsyntactic application), but this looks exactly like patching the
theory in order to accomodate such paradoxical constructions. So if you
don't decide to patch Lexical Phonology, then Late Insertion and its
consequence: 'lexical' phonological applying exclusively postsyntactically
seem to be a nice solution to the above-mentioned paradox.

(I'm unable to attribute this idea to any particular work; I used it in my
diss with a feeling that it 'has been around' for a while.)

Wondering if this can be of use to you,

Piotr

--
Piotr Banski
University of Warsaw
bansp at bigfoot.com


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Fri Nov 16 22:40:49 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 15:40:49 -0700
Subject: Alec Marantz: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply
 to Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <FRI.16.NOV.2001.154049.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Along the lines that Piotr is suggesting, you might look at Bruce
Hayes's article, "Precompiled Phrasal Phonology," in _The
Phonology-Syntax Connection_ Inkelas and Zec, eds., U of Chicago
Press, 1990.  His solution to preserve lexical phonology is to
"precompile" the results of a "lexical" phonological rule in the
lexicon even though the context of the rule won't be met until the
syntax.

>On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:
>
>>I'm looking for references to anything that gives phonological
>>arguments <italic>for</italic> late insertion or, specifically,
>><italic>against</italic> Lexical Phonology.
>
>How about looking at clitic constructions which undergo 'lexical'
>processes, although they are created *after* syntax?
>
>Obviously, you can postulate that some lexical rules reapply *in the very
>same fashion* in *restricted contexts* in the postsyntactic component, or
>postulate some kind of equivalent of the late Clitic Group in order to
>make such contexts appear less restricted (and hence more natural for
>postsyntactic application), but this looks exactly like patching the
>theory in order to accomodate such paradoxical constructions. So if you
>don't decide to patch Lexical Phonology, then Late Insertion and its
>consequence: 'lexical' phonological applying exclusively postsyntactically
>seem to be a nice solution to the above-mentioned paradox.
>
>(I'm unable to attribute this idea to any particular work; I used it in my
>diss with a feeling that it 'has been around' for a while.)
>
>Wondering if this can be of use to you,
>
>Piotr
>
>--
>Piotr Banski
>University of Warsaw
>bansp at bigfoot.com

--
marantz at mit.edu


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Sat Nov 17 19:25:44 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 12:25:44 -0700
Subject: Dan Everett: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply to
 Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <SAT.17.NOV.2001.122544.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

There is an interesting fact, not quite like what you asked for, but
leaning in the same direction. In recent field work, a colleague of mine
and I have discovered an interesting process of post-lexical structure
preservation in the Ge language, Suya (no other studies of this language
exist). There is a rule of phrase-final lenition of voicless occlusives
which is blocked just in case there is no lexical phoneme corresponding to
the lenited form. So, for example, p --> w and t --> r, but nothing
happens to k. This is because w and r are independently needed phonemes in
the language, but there is no corresponding continuant in the velar
position.

What this means is that one of the basic tenets of Lexical Phonology, that
structure-preservation is evidence for phonology in the lexicon, becomes
much less secure.

Or so it seemeth to me. The paper is in progress. Hope to have it done in
a couple of months, when I get out from under some other things.

Cheers,

Dan Everett

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> Dear DM-List,
>
>
> I'm looking for references to anything that gives phonological
> arguments <italic>for</italic> late insertion or, specifically,
> <italic>against</italic> Lexical Phonology. The arguments I've seen for
> late insertion are mainly based on the featural underspecification of
> Vocabulary items.
>
>
> If you have any suggestions, please let me know.  Many thanks!
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Martha
>
>
>
> mcginnis at ucalgary.ca
>


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Sat Nov 17 19:52:42 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 12:52:42 -0700
Subject: Martha McGinnis: phonological arguments for late insertion?
 (reply to Dan Everett)
In-Reply-To: <v04210100b81c6a158b35@[136.159.63.7]>
Message-ID: <SAT.17.NOV.2001.125242.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the information... sounds like an interesting project.
But is this really an argument against Lexical Phonology?  LP doesn't
necessitate structure-preserving postlexical rules, but I don't think
it rules them out either.  The situation might be different if we
found a 'lexical' phonological rule that ISN'T structure-preserving.
Anyway, the facts you describe are interesting -- thanks for the
suggestion.

-Martha


>There is an interesting fact, not quite like what you asked for, but
>leaning in the same direction. In recent field work, a colleague of mine
>and I have discovered an interesting process of post-lexical structure
>preservation in the Ge language, Suya (no other studies of this language
>exist). There is a rule of phrase-final lenition of voicless occlusives
>which is blocked just in case there is no lexical phoneme corresponding to
>the lenited form. So, for example, p --> w and t --> r, but nothing
>happens to k. This is because w and r are independently needed phonemes in
>the language, but there is no corresponding continuant in the velar
>position.
>
>What this means is that one of the basic tenets of Lexical Phonology, that
>structure-preservation is evidence for phonology in the lexicon, becomes
>much less secure.
>
>Or so it seemeth to me. The paper is in progress. Hope to have it done in
>a couple of months, when I get out from under some other things.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Dan Everett


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Mon Nov 19 16:13:06 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 09:13:06 -0700
Subject: Dan Everett: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply to
 Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <MON.19.NOV.2001.091306.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Martha,

Probably not an argument against LP, no. My point, poorly worded, was not
that this is a strong argument against LP, merely that: (i) so far as I
can tell this is a sui generis case, so it would be interesting to see if
others can identify similar cases that might have been
overlooked; (ii) while LP does not, as you point out, rule such cases out,
they are not expected and go against the grain a bit. Why should a
post-lexical process depend on so-called lexical information? It seems to
me, though I might very well be mistaken, that LP has nothing to say about
these examples. If that is the case, then there is a problem because if
there is a theory that does account well for post-lexical structural
preservation, then it will likely account for so-called lexical structural
preservation as well, obviating the need for an LP account.

Martha, you referred to my work as a 'project', a term associated with the
notion of Research Programme introduced by Imre Lakatos. This is too
generous, however. The Suya research is not a 'project' - just some cool
facts being written up, discovered fortuitously in helping someone figure
out a previously undescribed Amazonian language. A fringe benefit of
fieldwork.

Best,

Dan


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Mon Nov 19 16:15:22 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 09:15:22 -0700
Subject: Dan Everett: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply to
 Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <MON.19.NOV.2001.091522.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Martha and all,

One other thing on LP and Structure Preservation. The really neat idea
behind SP in Lexical Phonology, as I understand it, is that lexical rules
will be structure-preserving *because* in the lexicon there are no
allophones, only phonemes of one sort or another, depending at the level
you are at. (Now, the output of the lexicon, according to Mohanon and
others, turns out to be the so-called taxonomic phoneme of structuralism.
This is a good result, since it turns out, according to some LP research
and a lot of structuralist work, that people have intuitions not about
abstract or systematic phonemes, but about taxonomic phonemes (the crucial
structuralist and descriptivist evidence for this comes from reports of
speaker reactions in learning to use an orthography based on taxonomic
phonemes).)

LP can, of course, allow access in the post-lexical phonology to the
inventory of phonemes. That information is not lost. And this access will
serve to account for post-lexical structure preservation of the kind I am
claiming to exist. On the other hand, as I noted, this kind of structure
preservation no longer follows from the architecture of the model.
Post-lexical structure preservation cannot be due to the absence of
allophones/variation but to some other reason. Whatever that reason turns
out to be, it does not follow, as does lexical structure preservation,
from being bounded by the lexicon. This significantly weakens the entire
rationale behind lexical structure preservation because, as I stated, we
now need a second mechanism/explanation for this new kind of structure
preservation. Morris Halle raised similar objections to the necessity to
state twice idential distributional rules in the phonemic and
morphophonemic 'levels' of structuralist phonemics.

A model like DM would be able, I should think, to offer an account of this
post-lexical structure preservation which would also handle lexical st.
preservation, one of Lexical Phonology's core results. Do that and the
appeal of LP is significantly weakened. On the other hand, DM ought also
to be able to account for the remaining, very interesting LP result in
this regard, namely, the co-existence of both taxonomic and systematic
phonemes in a single grammar.

Dan Everett

On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> Hi Dan,
>
> Thanks for the information... sounds like an interesting project.
> But is this really an argument against Lexical Phonology?  LP doesn't
> necessitate structure-preserving postlexical rules, but I don't think
> it rules them out either.  The situation might be different if we
> found a 'lexical' phonological rule that ISN'T structure-preserving.
> Anyway, the facts you describe are interesting -- thanks for the
> suggestion.
>
> -Martha
>
>
> >There is an interesting fact, not quite like what you asked for, but
> >leaning in the same direction. In recent field work, a colleague of mine
> >and I have discovered an interesting process of post-lexical structure
> >preservation in the Ge language, Suya (no other studies of this language
> >exist). There is a rule of phrase-final lenition of voicless occlusives
> >which is blocked just in case there is no lexical phoneme corresponding to
> >the lenited form. So, for example, p --> w and t --> r, but nothing
> >happens to k. This is because w and r are independently needed phonemes in
> >the language, but there is no corresponding continuant in the velar
> >position.
> >
> >What this means is that one of the basic tenets of Lexical Phonology, that
> >structure-preservation is evidence for phonology in the lexicon, becomes
> >much less secure.
> >
> >Or so it seemeth to me. The paper is in progress. Hope to have it done in
> >a couple of months, when I get out from under some other things.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >
> >Dan Everett
>
>
> mcginnis at ucalgary.ca
>


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Mon Nov 19 17:57:13 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 10:57:13 -0700
Subject: Mike Maxwell: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Dan Everett)
Message-ID: <MON.19.NOV.2001.105713.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Dan Everett wrote:

>The really neat idea behind SP in Lexical Phonology,
>as I understand it, is that lexical rules will be structure-
>preserving *because* in the lexicon there are no
>allophones, only phonemes of one sort or another...
>(Now, the output of the lexicon, according to Mohanon
>and others, turns out to be the so-called taxonomic
>phoneme of structuralism.  This is a good result,
>since it turns out, according to some LP research
>and a lot of structuralist work, that people have
>intuitions not about abstract or systematic phonemes,
>but about taxonomic phonemes (the crucial
>structuralist and descriptivist evidence for this
>comes from reports of speaker reactions in learning
>to use an orthography based on taxonomic
>phonemes).)

I'd like to follow up on this, but I fear this is not the right mailing
list.  Nor do I wish to 'talk' with Dan (alone) by email, since it would be
interesting to hear more opinions (assuming there are still many lexical
phonologists out there, since OT seems to have taken over :-().  Is anyone
aware of a more suitable forum?

      Mike Maxwell
      Linguistic Data Consortium
      maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Tue Nov 20 22:20:38 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 15:20:38 -0700
Subject: Martha McGinnis: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Mike Maxwell)
In-Reply-To: <v04210100b81ef8532475@[136.159.63.15]>
Message-ID: <TUE.20.NOV.2001.152038.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Dear Mike,

There is, or should be, a relationship between lexical phonology and
DM.  Under DM there is no phonology in the pre-syntactic lexicon, so
there's an issue as to how the insights of LP should be recaptured.
For example, if there really is a highly local morphosyntactic domain
within which phonological rules must be 'structure-preserving', this
is an important insight no matter what theory we adopt. I think we
could stand more postings on LP, if people want to continue the
discussion here.

However, no more postings about 'taxonomic phonemes' will be
forwarded until someone defines the term.

-Martha


>Mike Maxwell wrote:
>
>Dan Everett wrote:
>
> >The really neat idea behind SP in Lexical Phonology,
> >as I understand it, is that lexical rules will be structure-
> >preserving *because* in the lexicon there are no
> >allophones, only phonemes of one sort or another...
> >(Now, the output of the lexicon, according to Mohanon
> >and others, turns out to be the so-called taxonomic
> >phoneme of structuralism.  This is a good result,
> >since it turns out, according to some LP research
> >and a lot of structuralist work, that people have
> >intuitions not about abstract or systematic phonemes,
> >but about taxonomic phonemes (the crucial
> >structuralist and descriptivist evidence for this
> >comes from reports of speaker reactions in learning
> >to use an orthography based on taxonomic
> >phonemes).)
>
>I'd like to follow up on this, but I fear this is not the right mailing
>list.  Nor do I wish to 'talk' with Dan (alone) by email, since it would be
>interesting to hear more opinions (assuming there are still many lexical
>phonologists out there, since OT seems to have taken over :-().  Is anyone
>aware of a more suitable forum?
>
>      Mike Maxwell
>      Linguistic Data Consortium
>      maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Wed Nov 21 16:06:25 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 09:06:25 -0700
Subject: Dan Everett: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <WED.21.NOV.2001.090625.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> Dear Mike,
>
> There is, or should be, a relationship between lexical phonology and
> DM.  Under DM there is no phonology in the pre-syntactic lexicon, so
> there's an issue as to how the insights of LP should be recaptured.
> For example, if there really is a highly local morphosyntactic domain
> within which phonological rules must be 'structure-preserving', this
> is an important insight no matter what theory we adopt. I think we
> could stand more postings on LP, if people want to continue the
> discussion here.

Yes, I agree that it seems quite relevant to DM. And I think that cases of
so-called Structure Preservation outside the lexicon (by LP's own
definition) are worth pursuing because they show that the insight of LP in
this regard, a genuine insight as Martha points out, is not a result of
the lexicon per se but of a constraint or constraints that are applicable
at different levels in the grammar, so that theories which allow
word-formation access to syntactic information might be in a privileged
position wrt these phenomena.
>
> However, no more postings about 'taxonomic phonemes' will be
> forwarded until someone defines the term.

Hmm, I am surprised this is a problem (though I also realize that some
people ask for definitions when they don't think there is one to drive
home their point subtly). A phoneme, still controversial in many parts of
Europe, and among many phoneticians internationally, is a set of sounds,
not features, which the native speaker hears as a single sound (the
general line things took after Daniel Jones at UCL made the intial
proposals). The label given to that set, as Syd Lamb pointed out in the
early 60s is irrelevant (you could use the number 4 to represent p for
example). Paul Postal replied that the label *is* relevant and introduced
the Naturalness Constraint to make this explicit. These perceptual
groupings are determined, however, by analysis at a single 'level' of the
grammar, the level which involves allophonic rules but not morphophonemic
rules. Postal used the term 'taxonomic phoneme' as a perjorative
description of these units. The idea was, as I understood it at the time
of my initial reading, that the phoneme as pursued in these theories was
not genuinely scientific, like Gen. Phon., say, because (i) they didn't
look for the systematic relations uniting deep and surface structures and
obliterating the allophonic/morphophonemic distinction and therefore (ii)
the phonemes of the structuralists were apparently just like the labels
given by naturalists in the early days of biological survey when the goal
was to classify rather than to explain. Postal's (1968) Aspects book is
still the best read on this, though Anderson's Phon in the 20th Century
gives a more detailed, less emotional, more objective survey of the ideas
(as Shane does briefly in his textbook).

Having given my version of history (not really having lived through it,
but having studied linguistics first with Pike, before moving on to
Generative and then post-Chomskyan views), I am under no illusion that
there will be widespread consensus with what I have just said. These
notions were rarely agreed upon and revisionism for various reasons is
common in scientific disciplines.

I would suspect that even now, certainly in a few years, someone on some
list is going to suspend discussion of Distributed Morphology until
someone defines the term. This is of course quite reasonable. We should
always rethink through the terms.

Cheers,

-- Dan Everett


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Thu Nov 22 21:59:10 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 14:59:10 -0700
Subject: Martha McGinnis: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Dan Everett)
In-Reply-To: <v04210101b8218093618c@[136.159.63.15]>
Message-ID: <THU.22.NOV.2001.145910.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

> > However, no more postings about 'taxonomic phonemes' will be
> > forwarded until someone defines the term.
>
>Hmm, I am surprised this is a problem (though I also realize that some
>people ask for definitions when they don't think there is one to drive
>home their point subtly).

To clarify, there was no hidden agenda.  I just wanted to make sure
that the discussion is accessible to any list members who haven't
internalized the phonology literature from the 1960s.

Cheers,
Martha


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Tue Nov 27 20:44:05 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 13:44:05 -0700
Subject: Mike Maxwell: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Dan Everett)
Message-ID: <TUE.27.NOV.2001.134405.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Having raised this issue (or at least having responded to Dan Everett's
mention of it in this list), I guess I should say something about it.
Actually, when there was no response to my original query (concerning a more
suitable forum) for several days, I decided it must not be of general
interest to the members of this mailing list, and off-lined a response to
Dan Everett.

But perhaps it is of interest here after all, so let me try to summarize
what I said to Dan, and (as best I can) his response to me.

Martha requested that the term "taxonomic phonemes" be defined.  I trust the
following will at least clarify, if not define it.  As to the term itself,
as Dan mentioned, it was a perjorative term--the American Structuralists
themselves would just have said "phonemes."  The problem is that the word
"phoneme" has been used in different ways, and in fact that is the core of
my query: I think that the Lexical Phonologists' use of "phoneme" (and for
that matter, the European Structuralists' use) is different enough from the
American Structuralists' use that they are really different concepts.

In the most general sense, quoting Dan's msg (of 11/21), a phoneme

>is a set of sounds, not features, which the native
>speaker hears as a single sound

It's when you try to pin things down a bit more that the trouble starts.

The leading idea among the structuralists was that phonemes were defined in
terms of contrast and complementary distribution (and free variation).  (I'm
going to assume that these terms don't need definition here, but feel free
to tell me I'm wrong.)  So in English, /p/ and /b/ are phonemes because they
are in contrast, whereas [ph] (the 'h' is superscripted, but you can't see
it on your machine :-)) and [p] are in complementry distribution (CD).

The difficulty with the definition of 'phoneme' is in the situation where a
contrast is neutralized (i.e. two phones are in contrast in one environ, but
in CD in another). The difficulty is particularly severe where the
neutralization can be observed in alternations in the morphology.  (The
contrast between /p/ and /b/ happens to be neutralized in certain
environments, where we get only [p].  But that wasn't perceived as a problem
for the theory, because there are no alternations: the environment only
occurs root-internal.)

An example of the neutralization (from Morris Halle) is Russian voicing.
Given that there is a contrast in Russian between /t/ and /d/, but not
between [c] and [j] (the 'c' and 'j' here are alveopalatal affricates), the
voicing of [c] to [j] before a voiced obstruent must be analyzed under
Taxonomic Phonemics as an allophonic rule, while the voicing of /t/ to /d/
must be analyzed as a morphophonemic rule.  Similar examples abound, of
course.

There are several approaches one could take to counter Halle's argument:

(1) Argue that there really is a difference in the two rules, with
native speakers being aware of the morphophonemic one (/t/ --> /d/), but
unaware of the allophonic one (/c/ --> [j]).  (One might look at whether the
degree of voicing is the same in both cases.)

(2) Give up the idea that allophonic rules can only choose an allophone of a
phoneme, and that they cannot change one phoneme into another.  Thus there
would be an allophonic rule (or rules, depending on how you count them)
/t/ --> [d] and /c/ --> [j].  But that would have been striking at the very
center of Taxonomic Phonemics, namely the idea of contrast vs. complementary
distribution.

(3) A variant of both these ideas would be to say that there are two voicing
processes, one of which is morphophonemic (and applies to change /t/ to
/d/, but does not affect /c/), the other of which is 'allophonic'--but
applies to convert 't' to 'd' AND 'c' to 'j' (you'll notice I've left off
the brackets).  The former applies in some situations (such as
word-internally), while the latter applies in other situations
(word-externally, perhaps).  This of course underlies the LP notion of
lexical vs. post-lexical rules.  (See e.g. Zsiga "An acoustic and
electropalatographic study of lexical and postlexical palatalization in
American English" p. 282-302 in _Phonology and Phonetic Evidence: Papers in
Laboratory Phonology IV_, edited by Bruce Connell and Amalia Arvaniti.


I think the structuralists, to the extent that they actually tried to
respond to this argument on empirical grounds, took approach (1).  Dan tells
me that Pike taught that phonemes could share allophones, which I take to be
(2), more or less.  (Pike was not your average structuralist--the American
Structuralists saw that, but the generativists either didn't, or ignored
it.)

All of this to say that the terms 'phoneme', 'allophone', and 'allophonic
rule' don't mean the same in LP as they did in American Structuralist
theories.  In particular, the notion that phonemes are defined in terms of
contrast and CD doesn't work in LP: in neutralizing environments, an
allophone can belong to more than one phoneme, a no-no for the American
Structuralists.  (There are also differences that have to do with the use of
features in place of atomic phonemes, but I think that's a fairly minor
difference, in comparison.  Your milage may differ, of course.)

There might, however, be an 'out'.  Suppose you could show that there was
some difference between the phones of the supposedly neutralized phonemes.
That is, suppose that neutralization was never complete, at least in the
sense of types (as opposed to tokens).  For example, maybe there was a
statistically detectable difference between the [d] allophone of /d/ and the
[d] allophone of /t/.  The difference might be that sometimes the voicing of
/t/ was incomplete, particularly if you asked native speakers to pronounce
the words carefully.  (For a similar idea with a different phonological
process, see e.g. Johnson, Flemming and Wright "The Hyperspace Effect:
Phonetic Targets are Hyperarticulated" _Language_ 69: 505-528.  The notion
is that what shows up acoustically may not always be what the speaker really
intends to say--mental phones are different from acoustic ones.)  Or the
difference might be detectable only by its effects on adjacent sounds, e.g.
by (statistical) length differences on the preceding vowels.  (Pike and
others called this 'displaced contrast'.)  Of course, to be convincing you'd
have to show this for for _every_ neutralizing environment in _every_
language (or at least an interesting sample of them!).  In that case, you
might be justified in saying that while one might transcribe both /t/ and
/d/ in the neutralizing environment with [d], in fact there are differences
in the two kinds of [d]s, at least on a statistical basis.  The result would
be that neutralization by allophonic rules (unlike morphophonemic rules) is
never complete.

Well, this has gotten to be a long-winded response.  I'll appreciate any
responses you might have--

      Mike Maxwell
      Linguistic Data Consortium
      maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Mon Nov  5 15:57:22 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 08:57:22 -0700
Subject: Christine Rinne: CFP GLAC-8 - Eighth Germanic Linguistics Annual
 Conference
Message-ID: <MON.5.NOV.2001.085722.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

 From Christine Rinne <crinne at INDIANA.EDU>:

Call for papers

GLAC-8: EIGHTH GERMANIC LINGUISTICS ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Indiana University, Bloomington

April 26-28, 2002

*     *     *     *     *

Featured Speakers:

Richard M. Hogg, University of Manchester
Joan Maling, Brandeis University
Susan Pintzuk, University of York

*     *     *     *     *

We invite colleagues at all levels (faculty, graduate students, and
independent scholars) to submit abstracts for 30-minute papers on any
linguistic or philological aspect of any historical or modern Germanic
language or dialect, including English (to the Early Modern period) and
the extra-territorial varieties. Papers from a range of linguistic
subfields, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
sociolinguistics, language acquisition, contact, and change, as well as
differing theoretical approaches, are welcome.

Papers will be selected for the program by a broad-based committee in a
double-blind process. Please send to the address below a one-page abstract
in a 12-point font, ready to be reproduced photographically. More
information on abstracts may be found at the conference web site listed
below. Submissions must be received by January 2, 2002. Notifications of
acceptance will be distributed by February 1,
2002.

GLAC-8
Department of Germanic Studies
Ballantine Hall 644
1020 East Kirkwood Avenue
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
U.S.A.

More information about abstracts and other aspects of the conference are
available at the conference web site, at
<http://www.indiana.edu/~glac8/index4.htm>. Or contact the conference
organizers, Robert D. Fulk (Dept. of English) and Rex A. Sprouse (Dept. of
Germanic Studies), at <glac8 at indiana.edu>.


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Fri Nov 16 20:56:32 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 13:56:32 -0700
Subject: Martha McGinnis: phonological arguments for late insertion?
Message-ID: <FRI.16.NOV.2001.135632.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

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From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Fri Nov 16 21:30:54 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 14:30:54 -0700
Subject: Piotr Banski: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply
 to Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <FRI.16.NOV.2001.143054.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> I'm looking for references to anything that gives phonological
> arguments <italic>for</italic> late insertion or, specifically,
> <italic>against</italic> Lexical Phonology.

How about looking at clitic constructions which undergo 'lexical'
processes, although they are created *after* syntax?

Obviously, you can postulate that some lexical rules reapply *in the very
same fashion* in *restricted contexts* in the postsyntactic component, or
postulate some kind of equivalent of the late Clitic Group in order to
make such contexts appear less restricted (and hence more natural for
postsyntactic application), but this looks exactly like patching the
theory in order to accomodate such paradoxical constructions. So if you
don't decide to patch Lexical Phonology, then Late Insertion and its
consequence: 'lexical' phonological applying exclusively postsyntactically
seem to be a nice solution to the above-mentioned paradox.

(I'm unable to attribute this idea to any particular work; I used it in my
diss with a feeling that it 'has been around' for a while.)

Wondering if this can be of use to you,

Piotr

--
Piotr Banski
University of Warsaw
bansp at bigfoot.com


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Fri Nov 16 22:40:49 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 15:40:49 -0700
Subject: Alec Marantz: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply
 to Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <FRI.16.NOV.2001.154049.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Along the lines that Piotr is suggesting, you might look at Bruce
Hayes's article, "Precompiled Phrasal Phonology," in _The
Phonology-Syntax Connection_ Inkelas and Zec, eds., U of Chicago
Press, 1990.  His solution to preserve lexical phonology is to
"precompile" the results of a "lexical" phonological rule in the
lexicon even though the context of the rule won't be met until the
syntax.

>On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:
>
>>I'm looking for references to anything that gives phonological
>>arguments <italic>for</italic> late insertion or, specifically,
>><italic>against</italic> Lexical Phonology.
>
>How about looking at clitic constructions which undergo 'lexical'
>processes, although they are created *after* syntax?
>
>Obviously, you can postulate that some lexical rules reapply *in the very
>same fashion* in *restricted contexts* in the postsyntactic component, or
>postulate some kind of equivalent of the late Clitic Group in order to
>make such contexts appear less restricted (and hence more natural for
>postsyntactic application), but this looks exactly like patching the
>theory in order to accomodate such paradoxical constructions. So if you
>don't decide to patch Lexical Phonology, then Late Insertion and its
>consequence: 'lexical' phonological applying exclusively postsyntactically
>seem to be a nice solution to the above-mentioned paradox.
>
>(I'm unable to attribute this idea to any particular work; I used it in my
>diss with a feeling that it 'has been around' for a while.)
>
>Wondering if this can be of use to you,
>
>Piotr
>
>--
>Piotr Banski
>University of Warsaw
>bansp at bigfoot.com

--
marantz at mit.edu


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Sat Nov 17 19:25:44 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 12:25:44 -0700
Subject: Dan Everett: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply to
 Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <SAT.17.NOV.2001.122544.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

There is an interesting fact, not quite like what you asked for, but
leaning in the same direction. In recent field work, a colleague of mine
and I have discovered an interesting process of post-lexical structure
preservation in the Ge language, Suya (no other studies of this language
exist). There is a rule of phrase-final lenition of voicless occlusives
which is blocked just in case there is no lexical phoneme corresponding to
the lenited form. So, for example, p --> w and t --> r, but nothing
happens to k. This is because w and r are independently needed phonemes in
the language, but there is no corresponding continuant in the velar
position.

What this means is that one of the basic tenets of Lexical Phonology, that
structure-preservation is evidence for phonology in the lexicon, becomes
much less secure.

Or so it seemeth to me. The paper is in progress. Hope to have it done in
a couple of months, when I get out from under some other things.

Cheers,

Dan Everett

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> Dear DM-List,
>
>
> I'm looking for references to anything that gives phonological
> arguments <italic>for</italic> late insertion or, specifically,
> <italic>against</italic> Lexical Phonology. The arguments I've seen for
> late insertion are mainly based on the featural underspecification of
> Vocabulary items.
>
>
> If you have any suggestions, please let me know.  Many thanks!
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Martha
>
>
>
> mcginnis at ucalgary.ca
>


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Sat Nov 17 19:52:42 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 12:52:42 -0700
Subject: Martha McGinnis: phonological arguments for late insertion?
 (reply to Dan Everett)
In-Reply-To: <v04210100b81c6a158b35@[136.159.63.7]>
Message-ID: <SAT.17.NOV.2001.125242.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the information... sounds like an interesting project.
But is this really an argument against Lexical Phonology?  LP doesn't
necessitate structure-preserving postlexical rules, but I don't think
it rules them out either.  The situation might be different if we
found a 'lexical' phonological rule that ISN'T structure-preserving.
Anyway, the facts you describe are interesting -- thanks for the
suggestion.

-Martha


>There is an interesting fact, not quite like what you asked for, but
>leaning in the same direction. In recent field work, a colleague of mine
>and I have discovered an interesting process of post-lexical structure
>preservation in the Ge language, Suya (no other studies of this language
>exist). There is a rule of phrase-final lenition of voicless occlusives
>which is blocked just in case there is no lexical phoneme corresponding to
>the lenited form. So, for example, p --> w and t --> r, but nothing
>happens to k. This is because w and r are independently needed phonemes in
>the language, but there is no corresponding continuant in the velar
>position.
>
>What this means is that one of the basic tenets of Lexical Phonology, that
>structure-preservation is evidence for phonology in the lexicon, becomes
>much less secure.
>
>Or so it seemeth to me. The paper is in progress. Hope to have it done in
>a couple of months, when I get out from under some other things.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Dan Everett


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Mon Nov 19 16:13:06 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 09:13:06 -0700
Subject: Dan Everett: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply to
 Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <MON.19.NOV.2001.091306.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Martha,

Probably not an argument against LP, no. My point, poorly worded, was not
that this is a strong argument against LP, merely that: (i) so far as I
can tell this is a sui generis case, so it would be interesting to see if
others can identify similar cases that might have been
overlooked; (ii) while LP does not, as you point out, rule such cases out,
they are not expected and go against the grain a bit. Why should a
post-lexical process depend on so-called lexical information? It seems to
me, though I might very well be mistaken, that LP has nothing to say about
these examples. If that is the case, then there is a problem because if
there is a theory that does account well for post-lexical structural
preservation, then it will likely account for so-called lexical structural
preservation as well, obviating the need for an LP account.

Martha, you referred to my work as a 'project', a term associated with the
notion of Research Programme introduced by Imre Lakatos. This is too
generous, however. The Suya research is not a 'project' - just some cool
facts being written up, discovered fortuitously in helping someone figure
out a previously undescribed Amazonian language. A fringe benefit of
fieldwork.

Best,

Dan


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Mon Nov 19 16:15:22 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 09:15:22 -0700
Subject: Dan Everett: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply to
 Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <MON.19.NOV.2001.091522.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Martha and all,

One other thing on LP and Structure Preservation. The really neat idea
behind SP in Lexical Phonology, as I understand it, is that lexical rules
will be structure-preserving *because* in the lexicon there are no
allophones, only phonemes of one sort or another, depending at the level
you are at. (Now, the output of the lexicon, according to Mohanon and
others, turns out to be the so-called taxonomic phoneme of structuralism.
This is a good result, since it turns out, according to some LP research
and a lot of structuralist work, that people have intuitions not about
abstract or systematic phonemes, but about taxonomic phonemes (the crucial
structuralist and descriptivist evidence for this comes from reports of
speaker reactions in learning to use an orthography based on taxonomic
phonemes).)

LP can, of course, allow access in the post-lexical phonology to the
inventory of phonemes. That information is not lost. And this access will
serve to account for post-lexical structure preservation of the kind I am
claiming to exist. On the other hand, as I noted, this kind of structure
preservation no longer follows from the architecture of the model.
Post-lexical structure preservation cannot be due to the absence of
allophones/variation but to some other reason. Whatever that reason turns
out to be, it does not follow, as does lexical structure preservation,
from being bounded by the lexicon. This significantly weakens the entire
rationale behind lexical structure preservation because, as I stated, we
now need a second mechanism/explanation for this new kind of structure
preservation. Morris Halle raised similar objections to the necessity to
state twice idential distributional rules in the phonemic and
morphophonemic 'levels' of structuralist phonemics.

A model like DM would be able, I should think, to offer an account of this
post-lexical structure preservation which would also handle lexical st.
preservation, one of Lexical Phonology's core results. Do that and the
appeal of LP is significantly weakened. On the other hand, DM ought also
to be able to account for the remaining, very interesting LP result in
this regard, namely, the co-existence of both taxonomic and systematic
phonemes in a single grammar.

Dan Everett

On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> Hi Dan,
>
> Thanks for the information... sounds like an interesting project.
> But is this really an argument against Lexical Phonology?  LP doesn't
> necessitate structure-preserving postlexical rules, but I don't think
> it rules them out either.  The situation might be different if we
> found a 'lexical' phonological rule that ISN'T structure-preserving.
> Anyway, the facts you describe are interesting -- thanks for the
> suggestion.
>
> -Martha
>
>
> >There is an interesting fact, not quite like what you asked for, but
> >leaning in the same direction. In recent field work, a colleague of mine
> >and I have discovered an interesting process of post-lexical structure
> >preservation in the Ge language, Suya (no other studies of this language
> >exist). There is a rule of phrase-final lenition of voicless occlusives
> >which is blocked just in case there is no lexical phoneme corresponding to
> >the lenited form. So, for example, p --> w and t --> r, but nothing
> >happens to k. This is because w and r are independently needed phonemes in
> >the language, but there is no corresponding continuant in the velar
> >position.
> >
> >What this means is that one of the basic tenets of Lexical Phonology, that
> >structure-preservation is evidence for phonology in the lexicon, becomes
> >much less secure.
> >
> >Or so it seemeth to me. The paper is in progress. Hope to have it done in
> >a couple of months, when I get out from under some other things.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >
> >Dan Everett
>
>
> mcginnis at ucalgary.ca
>


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Mon Nov 19 17:57:13 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 10:57:13 -0700
Subject: Mike Maxwell: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Dan Everett)
Message-ID: <MON.19.NOV.2001.105713.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Dan Everett wrote:

>The really neat idea behind SP in Lexical Phonology,
>as I understand it, is that lexical rules will be structure-
>preserving *because* in the lexicon there are no
>allophones, only phonemes of one sort or another...
>(Now, the output of the lexicon, according to Mohanon
>and others, turns out to be the so-called taxonomic
>phoneme of structuralism.  This is a good result,
>since it turns out, according to some LP research
>and a lot of structuralist work, that people have
>intuitions not about abstract or systematic phonemes,
>but about taxonomic phonemes (the crucial
>structuralist and descriptivist evidence for this
>comes from reports of speaker reactions in learning
>to use an orthography based on taxonomic
>phonemes).)

I'd like to follow up on this, but I fear this is not the right mailing
list.  Nor do I wish to 'talk' with Dan (alone) by email, since it would be
interesting to hear more opinions (assuming there are still many lexical
phonologists out there, since OT seems to have taken over :-().  Is anyone
aware of a more suitable forum?

      Mike Maxwell
      Linguistic Data Consortium
      maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Tue Nov 20 22:20:38 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 15:20:38 -0700
Subject: Martha McGinnis: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Mike Maxwell)
In-Reply-To: <v04210100b81ef8532475@[136.159.63.15]>
Message-ID: <TUE.20.NOV.2001.152038.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Dear Mike,

There is, or should be, a relationship between lexical phonology and
DM.  Under DM there is no phonology in the pre-syntactic lexicon, so
there's an issue as to how the insights of LP should be recaptured.
For example, if there really is a highly local morphosyntactic domain
within which phonological rules must be 'structure-preserving', this
is an important insight no matter what theory we adopt. I think we
could stand more postings on LP, if people want to continue the
discussion here.

However, no more postings about 'taxonomic phonemes' will be
forwarded until someone defines the term.

-Martha


>Mike Maxwell wrote:
>
>Dan Everett wrote:
>
> >The really neat idea behind SP in Lexical Phonology,
> >as I understand it, is that lexical rules will be structure-
> >preserving *because* in the lexicon there are no
> >allophones, only phonemes of one sort or another...
> >(Now, the output of the lexicon, according to Mohanon
> >and others, turns out to be the so-called taxonomic
> >phoneme of structuralism.  This is a good result,
> >since it turns out, according to some LP research
> >and a lot of structuralist work, that people have
> >intuitions not about abstract or systematic phonemes,
> >but about taxonomic phonemes (the crucial
> >structuralist and descriptivist evidence for this
> >comes from reports of speaker reactions in learning
> >to use an orthography based on taxonomic
> >phonemes).)
>
>I'd like to follow up on this, but I fear this is not the right mailing
>list.  Nor do I wish to 'talk' with Dan (alone) by email, since it would be
>interesting to hear more opinions (assuming there are still many lexical
>phonologists out there, since OT seems to have taken over :-().  Is anyone
>aware of a more suitable forum?
>
>      Mike Maxwell
>      Linguistic Data Consortium
>      maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Wed Nov 21 16:06:25 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 09:06:25 -0700
Subject: Dan Everett: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Martha McGinnis)
Message-ID: <WED.21.NOV.2001.090625.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> Dear Mike,
>
> There is, or should be, a relationship between lexical phonology and
> DM.  Under DM there is no phonology in the pre-syntactic lexicon, so
> there's an issue as to how the insights of LP should be recaptured.
> For example, if there really is a highly local morphosyntactic domain
> within which phonological rules must be 'structure-preserving', this
> is an important insight no matter what theory we adopt. I think we
> could stand more postings on LP, if people want to continue the
> discussion here.

Yes, I agree that it seems quite relevant to DM. And I think that cases of
so-called Structure Preservation outside the lexicon (by LP's own
definition) are worth pursuing because they show that the insight of LP in
this regard, a genuine insight as Martha points out, is not a result of
the lexicon per se but of a constraint or constraints that are applicable
at different levels in the grammar, so that theories which allow
word-formation access to syntactic information might be in a privileged
position wrt these phenomena.
>
> However, no more postings about 'taxonomic phonemes' will be
> forwarded until someone defines the term.

Hmm, I am surprised this is a problem (though I also realize that some
people ask for definitions when they don't think there is one to drive
home their point subtly). A phoneme, still controversial in many parts of
Europe, and among many phoneticians internationally, is a set of sounds,
not features, which the native speaker hears as a single sound (the
general line things took after Daniel Jones at UCL made the intial
proposals). The label given to that set, as Syd Lamb pointed out in the
early 60s is irrelevant (you could use the number 4 to represent p for
example). Paul Postal replied that the label *is* relevant and introduced
the Naturalness Constraint to make this explicit. These perceptual
groupings are determined, however, by analysis at a single 'level' of the
grammar, the level which involves allophonic rules but not morphophonemic
rules. Postal used the term 'taxonomic phoneme' as a perjorative
description of these units. The idea was, as I understood it at the time
of my initial reading, that the phoneme as pursued in these theories was
not genuinely scientific, like Gen. Phon., say, because (i) they didn't
look for the systematic relations uniting deep and surface structures and
obliterating the allophonic/morphophonemic distinction and therefore (ii)
the phonemes of the structuralists were apparently just like the labels
given by naturalists in the early days of biological survey when the goal
was to classify rather than to explain. Postal's (1968) Aspects book is
still the best read on this, though Anderson's Phon in the 20th Century
gives a more detailed, less emotional, more objective survey of the ideas
(as Shane does briefly in his textbook).

Having given my version of history (not really having lived through it,
but having studied linguistics first with Pike, before moving on to
Generative and then post-Chomskyan views), I am under no illusion that
there will be widespread consensus with what I have just said. These
notions were rarely agreed upon and revisionism for various reasons is
common in scientific disciplines.

I would suspect that even now, certainly in a few years, someone on some
list is going to suspend discussion of Distributed Morphology until
someone defines the term. This is of course quite reasonable. We should
always rethink through the terms.

Cheers,

-- Dan Everett


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Thu Nov 22 21:59:10 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 14:59:10 -0700
Subject: Martha McGinnis: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Dan Everett)
In-Reply-To: <v04210101b8218093618c@[136.159.63.15]>
Message-ID: <THU.22.NOV.2001.145910.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

> > However, no more postings about 'taxonomic phonemes' will be
> > forwarded until someone defines the term.
>
>Hmm, I am surprised this is a problem (though I also realize that some
>people ask for definitions when they don't think there is one to drive
>home their point subtly).

To clarify, there was no hidden agenda.  I just wanted to make sure
that the discussion is accessible to any list members who haven't
internalized the phonology literature from the 1960s.

Cheers,
Martha


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca


From mcginnis at ucalgary.ca  Tue Nov 27 20:44:05 2001
From: mcginnis at ucalgary.ca (Martha McGinnis)
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 13:44:05 -0700
Subject: Mike Maxwell: taxonomic phonemics (reply to Dan Everett)
Message-ID: <TUE.27.NOV.2001.134405.0700.DMLIST@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Having raised this issue (or at least having responded to Dan Everett's
mention of it in this list), I guess I should say something about it.
Actually, when there was no response to my original query (concerning a more
suitable forum) for several days, I decided it must not be of general
interest to the members of this mailing list, and off-lined a response to
Dan Everett.

But perhaps it is of interest here after all, so let me try to summarize
what I said to Dan, and (as best I can) his response to me.

Martha requested that the term "taxonomic phonemes" be defined.  I trust the
following will at least clarify, if not define it.  As to the term itself,
as Dan mentioned, it was a perjorative term--the American Structuralists
themselves would just have said "phonemes."  The problem is that the word
"phoneme" has been used in different ways, and in fact that is the core of
my query: I think that the Lexical Phonologists' use of "phoneme" (and for
that matter, the European Structuralists' use) is different enough from the
American Structuralists' use that they are really different concepts.

In the most general sense, quoting Dan's msg (of 11/21), a phoneme

>is a set of sounds, not features, which the native
>speaker hears as a single sound

It's when you try to pin things down a bit more that the trouble starts.

The leading idea among the structuralists was that phonemes were defined in
terms of contrast and complementary distribution (and free variation).  (I'm
going to assume that these terms don't need definition here, but feel free
to tell me I'm wrong.)  So in English, /p/ and /b/ are phonemes because they
are in contrast, whereas [ph] (the 'h' is superscripted, but you can't see
it on your machine :-)) and [p] are in complementry distribution (CD).

The difficulty with the definition of 'phoneme' is in the situation where a
contrast is neutralized (i.e. two phones are in contrast in one environ, but
in CD in another). The difficulty is particularly severe where the
neutralization can be observed in alternations in the morphology.  (The
contrast between /p/ and /b/ happens to be neutralized in certain
environments, where we get only [p].  But that wasn't perceived as a problem
for the theory, because there are no alternations: the environment only
occurs root-internal.)

An example of the neutralization (from Morris Halle) is Russian voicing.
Given that there is a contrast in Russian between /t/ and /d/, but not
between [c] and [j] (the 'c' and 'j' here are alveopalatal affricates), the
voicing of [c] to [j] before a voiced obstruent must be analyzed under
Taxonomic Phonemics as an allophonic rule, while the voicing of /t/ to /d/
must be analyzed as a morphophonemic rule.  Similar examples abound, of
course.

There are several approaches one could take to counter Halle's argument:

(1) Argue that there really is a difference in the two rules, with
native speakers being aware of the morphophonemic one (/t/ --> /d/), but
unaware of the allophonic one (/c/ --> [j]).  (One might look at whether the
degree of voicing is the same in both cases.)

(2) Give up the idea that allophonic rules can only choose an allophone of a
phoneme, and that they cannot change one phoneme into another.  Thus there
would be an allophonic rule (or rules, depending on how you count them)
/t/ --> [d] and /c/ --> [j].  But that would have been striking at the very
center of Taxonomic Phonemics, namely the idea of contrast vs. complementary
distribution.

(3) A variant of both these ideas would be to say that there are two voicing
processes, one of which is morphophonemic (and applies to change /t/ to
/d/, but does not affect /c/), the other of which is 'allophonic'--but
applies to convert 't' to 'd' AND 'c' to 'j' (you'll notice I've left off
the brackets).  The former applies in some situations (such as
word-internally), while the latter applies in other situations
(word-externally, perhaps).  This of course underlies the LP notion of
lexical vs. post-lexical rules.  (See e.g. Zsiga "An acoustic and
electropalatographic study of lexical and postlexical palatalization in
American English" p. 282-302 in _Phonology and Phonetic Evidence: Papers in
Laboratory Phonology IV_, edited by Bruce Connell and Amalia Arvaniti.


I think the structuralists, to the extent that they actually tried to
respond to this argument on empirical grounds, took approach (1).  Dan tells
me that Pike taught that phonemes could share allophones, which I take to be
(2), more or less.  (Pike was not your average structuralist--the American
Structuralists saw that, but the generativists either didn't, or ignored
it.)

All of this to say that the terms 'phoneme', 'allophone', and 'allophonic
rule' don't mean the same in LP as they did in American Structuralist
theories.  In particular, the notion that phonemes are defined in terms of
contrast and CD doesn't work in LP: in neutralizing environments, an
allophone can belong to more than one phoneme, a no-no for the American
Structuralists.  (There are also differences that have to do with the use of
features in place of atomic phonemes, but I think that's a fairly minor
difference, in comparison.  Your milage may differ, of course.)

There might, however, be an 'out'.  Suppose you could show that there was
some difference between the phones of the supposedly neutralized phonemes.
That is, suppose that neutralization was never complete, at least in the
sense of types (as opposed to tokens).  For example, maybe there was a
statistically detectable difference between the [d] allophone of /d/ and the
[d] allophone of /t/.  The difference might be that sometimes the voicing of
/t/ was incomplete, particularly if you asked native speakers to pronounce
the words carefully.  (For a similar idea with a different phonological
process, see e.g. Johnson, Flemming and Wright "The Hyperspace Effect:
Phonetic Targets are Hyperarticulated" _Language_ 69: 505-528.  The notion
is that what shows up acoustically may not always be what the speaker really
intends to say--mental phones are different from acoustic ones.)  Or the
difference might be detectable only by its effects on adjacent sounds, e.g.
by (statistical) length differences on the preceding vowels.  (Pike and
others called this 'displaced contrast'.)  Of course, to be convincing you'd
have to show this for for _every_ neutralizing environment in _every_
language (or at least an interesting sample of them!).  In that case, you
might be justified in saying that while one might transcribe both /t/ and
/d/ in the neutralizing environment with [d], in fact there are differences
in the two kinds of [d]s, at least on a statistical basis.  The result would
be that neutralization by allophonic rules (unlike morphophonemic rules) is
never complete.

Well, this has gotten to be a long-winded response.  I'll appreciate any
responses you might have--

      Mike Maxwell
      Linguistic Data Consortium
      maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu