Metaphor for Categories

Geoffrey S. Nathan geoffn at SIU.EDU
Fri Feb 11 20:02:14 UTC 2000


At 11:13 AM 2/11/2000 -0700, Catie wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>In fact, Miller, Joanne. 1994. On the internal structure of phonetic
>categories: a progress report.  Cognition 50: 271-285 shows evidence for
>graded phonetic category structure which supports both the prototype and
>exemplar models.
>
>Also look for Joan Bybee's forthcoming Phonology and Language Use (John
>Benjamins, in preparation) for critique of the classical phoneme analysis.
>
>Does anyone else have recommended readings on this topic? I would be
>particularly interested in anything on the association of what are
>traditionally "segments" and what are usually characterized as independent
>prosodic features. For instance, if a particular construction tends to
>take a particular kind of sentence stress (eg an element of a predictable
>grammatical construction), how do we represent this in our grammar? Do the
>vocalic "segments" remain as full vowels or does the vowel representation
>change due to a very regular (reduced) prosodic environment?
>
>And, is this process quantitatively different from representation of
>vowels in clearly lexical items? which also always occur in constructions.
>
>Catie Berkenfield
>Department of Linguistics
>University of New Mexico



In a number of papers I have argued that phonemes are prototype categories,
with phonological processes serving as the analog of image schema
transformations (a la Lakoff/Brugmann's analysis of 'over').  Such facts as
phonemic overlap and phonemicization are easily understood in these
terms.  Relevant references include:

REFERENCES
Hurch, Bernhard, and Geoffrey S. Nathan. 1996. "Naturalness in Phonology."
STUF (Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung) 49(3):231-45.
Nathan, Geoffrey S. 1986. "Phonemes as Mental Categories." Pp. 212-24 in
Proceedings of the 12th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society., vol. 12.
------. 1989. "Preliminaries to a Theory of Phonological Substance:  The
Substance of Sonority." Pp. 55-68 in Linguistic Categorization, edited by
Roberta Corrigan, Fred Eckman, and Michael Noonan. Amsterdam Studies in the
Theory and History of Linguistic Science.  Series IV - Current Issues in
Linguistic Theory.  Vol. 61. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
------. 1995. "How the Phoneme Inventory Gets Its Shape--Cognitive
Grammar's View of Phonological Systems." Rivista Di Linguistica 6(2):275-88.
------. 1996. "Towards a Cognitive Phonology." Pp. 107-20 in Natural
Phonology:  The State of the Art, eds Bernhard Hurch and Richard Rhodes.
Berlin: Mouton/de Gruyter.
------. 1999. "What Functionalists Can Learn from Formalists in Phonology."
Pp. 305-27 in Proceedings of the Symposium on Formalism and Functionalism.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Much of my work supports the traditional phoneme analysis (specifically the
Baudouin/Sapir/Stampe view, not Bloomfieldian or Generative Phonology
versions), although some of it can be recast in the OT framework.

Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of Linguistics
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517
Phone:  (618) 453-3421 (Office) / FAX (618) 453-6527
         (618) 549-0106 (Home)
                                                         geoffn at siu.edu
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