16.2194, Review: Phonology: Smith (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2194. Sun Jul 17 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2194, Review: Phonology: Smith (2004)

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1)
Date: 16-Jul-2005
From: Lev Blumenfeld < lblum at stanford.edu >
Subject: Phonological Augmentation in Prominent Positions 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 16:05:47
From: Lev Blumenfeld < lblum at stanford.edu >
Subject: Phonological Augmentation in Prominent Positions 
 

AUTHOR: Smith, Jennifer
TITLE: Phonological Augmentation in Prominent Positions
SERIES: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Routledge
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2214.html


Lev A. Blumenfeld, Stanford University

SUMMARY

Phonological Augmentation in Prominent Positions, a slightly revised 
version of Jennifer Smith's 2002 UMass dissertation, addresses the role of 
substantive pressures on formal phonological systems, focusing on the 
behavior of prominent positions. The book's central claim is that 
phonological grammars contain both an abstract, formal mechanism that 
generates OT constraints from a limited set of primitive objects, and a 
set of conditions, or filters, that arise from phonetic or 
psycholinguistic factors. The job of these substantive filters is to 
determine which constraints among all the formally possible ones may be 
members of the universal constraint set, CON. Under this Schema/Filter 
model of CON, substantive pressures affect grammars only indirectly, by 
determining which constraints can in principle be active in a grammar, and 
not by influencing actual phonologies of actual languages. Smith's 
illustration of this proposal comes from a detailed investigation of 
phonological augmentation in prominent positions.

In Chapter 1 Smith outlines the central issue addressed in the book, "the 
question of how the phonology, a formal system that manipulates abstract, 
formal objects, can nevertheless be shaped by substantive considerations" 
(p.4). The chapter serves as an introduction of the Schema/Filter model of 
OT phonology and the empirical domain of the book. Smith argues for 
dividing prominent or strong positions into two types: phonetically and 
psycholinguistically strong positions (henceforth ph-strong and ps-
strong). Augmentation of ph-strong positions serves to increase their 
inherent perceptual salience, while augmentation of ps-strong positions 
caters to processing pressures such as early-stage word recognition and 
demarcation of word boundaries. Ph-strong positions discussed are the 
stressed syllable, onset (or released) consonants, and long vowels. Ps-
strong positions are the initial syllable and the morphological root. 
Markedness constraints relativized to both types of positions are subject 
to a general substantive filter, the Prominence Condition; another filter, 
the Segmental Contrast Condition, applies to constraints on ps-strong 
positions.

The Prominence Condition requires augmentation constraints referring to 
strong positions to call for perceptually prominent properties to be 
present in those positions. The Segmental Contrast Condition further 
restricts augmentation constraints referring to ps-strong positions by 
prohibiting them from altering features that are important in early-stage 
word recognition, unless the constraint's effect is to demarcate the left 
edge of a word.

Smith presents phonological evidence for the notion 'strong position' and 
compares two kinds of constraint schemas that can be used to analyze 
augmentation effects: faithfulness constraints referring to weak positions 
(F/wk) vs. markedness constraints referring to strong positions (M/str), 
arguing for the latter on the grounds that strong, not weak positions, 
tend to be more easily definable.

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical framework of the analysis of 
augmentation processes. Building on the previous work of Eisner and Hayes, 
Smith lays out the Schema/Filter model of CON. The theory contains a set 
of primitives (features, correspondence relations, strong positions), a 
set of constraint schemas (e.g. Ident, Align, the augmentation schema 
C/str), and substantive filters on potential constraints.

Discussing the nature of ph-strong positions, Smith argues that the notion 
is an abstract one, only indirectly related to phonetic detail such as the 
presence of cues to contrasts. The argument for this claim, often repeated 
elsewhere in the book, is that M/str augmentation constraints may have "no 
relationship to the featural contrast for which the [strong] position has 
special salient cues. Thus, the status of the stressed syllable as a 
strong position is more abstract and general than the phonetic origin of 
that privileged status" (p.32).

The notion of a ps-strong position is also abstract in some sense: while 
psycholinguistic importance of phonological material tapers off gradually 
from the initial syllable onward, phonologically it is only the initial 
syllable that is privileged with respect to the others, without any 
evidence of gradience.

The remainder of the chapter contains a detailed illustration of how the 
Schema/Filter model applies to phonological augmentation. The Prominence 
Condition requires that markedness constraints relativized to prominent 
positions be augmentation constraints, i.e. call for the presence of 
perceptually prominent properties. In other words, markedness constraints 
can be relativized to prominent positions if they would make that position 
even more prominent "by association with some perceptually salient 
property" (p.44). So a constraint forcing stressed syllables to be heavy 
passes this test, while a constraint banning mid vowels in the stressed 
syllable does not. Smith's way of testing whether a given constraint 
counts as an augmentation constraint relies on the substantive notion 
of "perceptual prominence": if a candidate that satisfies the constraint 
is more prominent than a similar one that does not, then the constraint is 
an augmentation constraint. Perceptual prominence itself is grounded in 
extragrammatical factors: "it may be appropriate to categorize one 
stimulus as more perceptually prominent than another if the first stimulus 
elicits a neural response of greatera magnitude than that elicited by the 
second" (p.45).

Smith then discusses several constraints that qualify as augmentation 
constraint by her criteria: HeavySyll, *Peak/X, Onset, *Onset/X, 
HavePlace, H(igh)Tone, and HaveStress. Cross-classifying with the five 
strong positions, Smith arrives at a list of constraints predicted to be 
potentially active in a language.

Smith then moves on to ps-strong positions and the constraint filter 
specific to them, the Segmental Contrast Condition. This filter prevents 
augmentation constraints referring to strong positions from altering 
features that are distinguished in early-stage word recognition. In 
practice, this means that constraints neutralizing segmental contrasts are 
not allowed to be relativized to psycholinguistically strong positions, 
since it is segmental and not prosodic features that play a role in early-
stage word recognition. Interestingly, syllable quantity is 'segmental 
enough' to be controlled by this condition, but stress is not. The 
Segmental Contrast Condition has an important codicil: constraints are 
exempt from it if they serve to demarcate the left edge of a constituent. 
This clause allows Smith to account for constraints that call for word-
initial onsets.

The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Steriade's Licensing By 
Cue theory (LBC) as a filter on positional faithfulness constraints. LBC 
theory claims that the presence of cues to a feature in a given position 
is responsible for the existence of a faithfulness constraint protecting 
that feature in that position. Smith suggests that one can think of the 
information about cues to contrast serves as a substantive filter on 
positional faithfulness constraints. Smith argues that while it is the 
case that positional faithfulness constraints relativized to ph-strong 
positions are subject to LBC -- in other words, those constraints only 
protect those features for which the position has special cues -- this is 
not the case for ps-strong positions. For example, stressed syllable 
faithfulness constraints are limited to vowel features, while initial 
syllable faithfulness includes consonantal features as well. Smith 
suggests that this difference can be accounted for by a substantive filter 
on a free constraint construction mechanism.

Having laid the groundwork of the theory in the two opening chapters, 
Smith moves onto a detailed investigation of augmentation phenomena. 
Chapter 3 covers ps-strong positions and Chapter 4 ps-strong ones. Both 
chapters compare the predicted set of augmentation constraints with 
typological observations.

Chapter 3 opens with a discussion of augmentation constraint referring to 
stressed syllables. Smith considers five augmentation constraints: 
HeavySyll, HTone, *Peak/X (calling for high-sonority nuclei), Onset, and 
*Onset/X (calling for low-sonority onsets). Relativized to stressed 
syllables, each of these constraints, Smith claims, produces two kinds of 
phonological patterns: augmentation of stressed syllables, and attraction 
of stress to the augmented property in question. All ten patterns are 
illustrated with actual examples.

Smith also looks at positional augmentation of long vowels and syllable 
onsets.

Chapter 4 moves on to ps-strong positions, the initial syllable and the 
root, exemplifying the interactions with the constraints Onset and 
*Onset/X. Relativized to the initial syllable, these constraints call for 
the presence of word-initial onsets and low-sonority onsets, respectively. 
Both patterns are attested. An interesting case is presented by Mongolian 
and some other languages, where word-initial glides but not liquids are 
allowed, in apparent contradiction to the predicted patterns. This problem 
prompts a discussion of the differences between true onset glides and 
nuclear onglides, which, Smith proposes, accounts for the aberrant 
behavior of Mongolian.

Augmentation of the strong position 'Root' is exemplified with the 
constraint HaveStressRoot. Smith also suggests that root minimality 
effects may also be due to augmentation constraints, but leaves the 
specifics for future research.

Chapter 4 moves on to a lengthy discussion of psycholinguistic evidence 
behind the Segmental Contrast Condition, the filter specific to ps-strong 
positions. Smith offers evidence showing a distinction between early- and 
later-stage word recognition, and evidences supporting the relatively 
greater importance for early-stage word recognition of segmental material 
vs. prosodic information, roots vs. affixes, and initial vs. medial 
segments. Smith concludes the chapter with an argument that what she has 
been calling the 'initial syllable' is the first syllable of the 
morphological rather than the prosodic word.

The final chapter of the book is dedicated to the relationship between 
positional augmentation and positional neutralization. After presenting 
several OT analyses of neutralization phenomena, Smith argues that they 
are independent of the augmentation processes that had been the focus of 
the preceding chapters. Two separate constraint families are required for 
these two types of processes.

EVALUATION/DISCUSSION

_Phonological augmentation_ lives up to its goal as an important 
contribution to one of the most important recent debates in phonology on 
the role of functional pressures in phonological systems. In part 
functionalist and in part formalist, the book offers a well-presented, 
thoroughly argued, and thought-provoking proposal that will prove to be an 
important step toward an answer to this central question in phonological 
theory.

Smith's exposition is detailed and precise. Perhaps, to make the argument 
even more clear, the material on psycholinguistic evidence consigned to 
the end of Chapter 4 could have been placed earlier in the volume. 
Otherwise, the book is readable and easy to follow. Important points are 
reinforced frequently throughout, the predictions of the theory are 
clearly laid out, and the author's goals are always in the reader's sight.

I will now raise one substantive issue having to do with the role of 
functional pressures in phonology, and two objections to Smith's proposal.

The central and most interesting aspect of Smith's proposal is the 
indirect way in which substantive pressures shape phonological grammars. 
Smith offers at least two explicit arguments for her position. 
Augmentation of both ph- and ps-strong positions shows properties not 
easily explicable in a more directly functionalist theory. First, the 
stressed syllable, a ph-strong position, undergoes augmentation of 
features not directly related to its phonetic prominence, showing that the 
notion of 'prominent' is more abstract than the phonetic facts themselves 
and that functional pressures must apply at a more abstract level. Second, 
the initial syllable, a ps-strong position, is phonologically 
categorically stronger than the rest of the word, even though 
psycholinguistic importance tapers off gradually as one goes farther away 
from the beginning of the word.

In addition to these two arguments, the typological survey in Chs. 3 and 4 
gives an empirical argument, even if left implicit, that the substantive 
pressures act at the level of constraint construction in CON rather than 
at the level of individual grammars. Consider the Segmental Contrast 
Condition: it rules out augmentation constraints relativized to ps-strong 
positions that alter segmental features. This explains the absence of such 
constraints as HeavySyllable and *Peak/X (calling for high-sonority 
nuclei) relativized to the initial syllable. This predicts that there 
should not be vowel lengthening or lowering in word-initial syllables 
independently of stress. The functional explanation behind this fact is 
that segmental contrasts, unlike prosodic ones, are important in early-
stage word recognition, and therefore neutralizing them would be 
dysfunctional.

However, if this functional pressure were to exert is influence at the 
level of individual phonologies rather than as a constraint filter, then 
augmentation constraints relativized to ps-strong positions would be 
unable to affect only those segmental features that are CONTRASTIVE in the 
language. Allophonic features do not distinguish words from each other and 
therefore are at least not as important as contrastive features in word 
recognition. In other words, a more directly functional theory of 
augmentation in ps-strong positions would predict that languages should 
allow COMPLEMENTARY distribution of segmental features between ps-strong 
and ps-weak positions. Such a language would have, for example, long 
vowels in the initial syllable and short vowels elsewhere, due to the 
constraint HeavySyllable/S1. Likewise, the constraints in the family 
*Peak/X/S1, calling for high-sonority nuclei, could have their effect in a 
language without contrastive mid vowels. Such a language would have mid 
and high vowels in complementary distribution: the former in initial 
syllables, the latter elsewhere.

Smith lists no such languages, and I also am not aware of examples of such 
a distribution. If this pattern does not exist, then its absence lends 
empirical support to Smith's hypothesis that functional pressures are 
moderated by an abstract component of phonology such as the constraint 
construction mechanism, rather than directly affecting actual phonologies.

Next I will point out what seem to be to be two shortcomings of Smith's 
book. First, some of the proposals are vague enough that the reader is 
unsure how to apply the reasoning to new cases. The notion that does much 
explanatory work in Smith's theory is "perceptual salience". Knowing which 
of two forms is more salient than the other allows one to decide what 
counts as an augmentation constraint. This in turn is crucially important 
for the Prominence Condition, the constraint filter that allows only 
augmentation constraints to refer to prominent positions.

Smith grounds the notion of salience in neurophysiology: one stimulus is 
more salient than another if it "elicits a neural response of greater 
magnitude" (p.45). Smith admits that this proposal is a preliminary step 
toward a more explicit and fleshed out criterion. As it stands, however, 
it is not always clear how to apply the Prominence Condition to new cases.

Smith does not offer neurological or psycholinguistic evidence for the 
categories she considers prominent, viz. the heavy syllable, high tone, or 
relative position on the sonority scale (do liquid syllable nuclei elicit 
a greater neural response than nasal ones?). She does provide a 
psycholinguistic argument for Onset and *Onset/X constraints: 
interspersing low-sonority consonants and high-sonority vowels allows the 
perceptual system to more efficiently recover from adaptation, making both 
the consonants and the vowels more perceptible. This argument, however, 
could be used just as easily to support the constraint Coda, because the 
perceptual system cares simply about alternating dissimilar segments, not 
about syllable structure.

The fit between Smith's model and the observed data is very good: those 
and only those features claimed to be salient turn out to participate in 
augmentation processes. Given the looseness of the criterion for selecting 
salient features, however, it would have been helpful to more 
systematically consider features that are NOT salient and thus do not 
gravitate toward prominent positions. In other words, the argument could 
have been made stronger if Smith considered not only the positive side 
(salient features that participate in augmentation), but also the negative 
side (non-salient features that do not). Smith does mention some examples, 
e.g. the absence of a constraint banning mid vowels in stressed syllables. 
There are, though, less clear-cut cases which could have been discussed in 
the book to help make the proposal more clear. What about aspiration and 
glottalization? Is an aspirated consonant more perceptually salient than a 
plain one? If not, what is behind the recurring pattern of attraction of 
laryngeal features like aspiration to the onsets of stressed syllables?

Once again, these difficulties with Smith's proposal arise due to its 
admittedly preliminary status.

I will raise one other substantive point. Smith shows that the general 
classes of constraints predicted by her system are all attested in the 
world's languages. It seems, however, that the typology is not as evenly 
populated when we look at the constraints within each class. The *Peak/X 
class, for example, calls for high-sonority syllable nuclei. Relativized 
to the stressed syllable, it generates the familiar pattern of sonority-
driven stress. The same constraint relativized to the strong position Long 
Vowel predicts a pattern of lowering of long vowels. Smith gives one 
example (Yokuts) where long high vowels fall; she could have added here 
languages like Nalik that have only one long vowel, and it is low. 
However, far more frequent is the opposite pattern, often seen in chain 
shifts: long vowels rise (cf. the English Great Vowel shift). Perhaps, 
there is another explanation for long vowels rising, but if there are 
separate functional accounts for two opposite patterns, what explanatory 
power does either of them have?

Next, consider the Onset family of constraints. There are many examples of 
languages where stress is repelled from onsetless syllables; these stress 
systems are analyzed with the simple constraint Onset relativized to the 
stressed syllable. The constraint family *Onset/X relativized to the 
stressed syllable, however, is not very well supported typologically. 
There is one example (Niuafo'ou) where stress is repelled from syllables 
that begin with glides. In Pirahã, the voicing of the onset plays a role. 
There are no examples where the cutoff on the sonority scale between 
acceptable and unacceptable stressed syllable onsets occurs elsewhere, 
e.g. between liquids and nasals, or between nasals and obstruents. This 
typological sparseness of stress effects due to *Onset/X is not 
necessarily an argument against Smith's proposal, but it appears to be a 
significant fact in search of an explanation. 

I hasten to add that despite the two objections that I raised, Smith's 
book offers a stimulating argument for a particular view of phonological 
theory, and will surely provoke much debate in the near future. It is 
obligatory reading for phonologists interested in the interplay of formal 
and functional explanations. The few and minor shortcomings of the book, 
no doubt, are a sign of exciting future research.

A final note on the presentation of the book: The editors did not correct 
egregious pagination problems around large tables, which often mislead the 
reader that a chapter has ended (e.g. most of p. 77 is blank). Also, 
shading in tableaux looks like second-generation photocopy. This is not 
serious and would not have been worth mentioning except that the volume 
costs $90. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Lev Blumenfeld is a fourth-year graduate student in linguistics at 
Stanford, specializing in word-level prosody and in metrics. He is 
currently working on the interaction of prosodic structure and segmental 
processes, and on the role of stress in Latin quantitative meters.





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