25.4632, Review: Phonology: Hannahs (2013)

Tue Nov 18 20:49:42 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4632. Tue Nov 18 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4632, Review: Phonology: Hannahs (2013)

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Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:48:03
From: Jean-François Mondon [jfmondon at gmail.com]
Subject: The Phonology of Welsh

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-4548.html

AUTHOR: S. J. Hannahs
TITLE: The Phonology of Welsh
SERIES TITLE: The Phonology of the World's Languages
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Jean-François R. Mondon, Minot State University

Review's Editor: Anthony Aristar

SUMMARY

This book presents the phonology of Welsh, working through its various levels
from the segmental to the prosodic, focusing throughout on productive
phonological processes.  As Hannahs states at the outset, the book aims for a
descriptive, theory-neutral presentation of the facts but his conviction of
the appropriateness of Optimality Theory (OT) as a framework for investigation
compels him to adopt the model from chapter 4 on.

Chapter 1 “Introduction & Background” starts off by laying out the assumptions
adopted in the book.  To begin with, since Welsh has no spoken standard, the
obvious question arises as to what form of Welsh is being investigated. 
Hannahs assumes, correctly in my opinion, that there is a shared “abstract
underlying phonological system that allows us to speak of the phonology of
Welsh as relatively unitary, and that dialect variation is primarily a
question of the various ways in which the dialects implement the phonology”
(pp. 2-3).  His second assumption is that OT can not only present a nice
template upon which to work but that even more importantly if offers a way of
discovering hitherto unseen connections.  This is particularly true with
respect to the role of foot structure as Hannahs discusses in chapters 4 and
5.  Contra the work of others, Hannahs focusses on a strictly synchronic
analysis, stating that it offers a new understanding which a strictly
diachronic analysis simply cannot.  This focus does not shy Hannahs away from
littering throughout the book the origin of various synchronic phenomena.  The
chapter concludes with a discussion of the history of the language and its
modern dialectal situation.

Chapter 2 “A Survey of Welsh Phonetics” works through the various layers of
the sound system of the language.  It begins by mentioning those major
phonetic traits which are only true of some dialects, such as the southern
merger of /i/ and barred-i as well as the absence of /h/, voiceless nasals and
[rh] also from southern varieties.  The interesting data Hannahs highlights
with respect to the stops include the aspiration of voiceless stops everywhere
but word-finally, the germination of voiceless stops following a stressed
vowel, and the half-voicing of voiced stops except when in a fully voiced
environment.  As for the other obstruents, affricates have arisen through the
palatalization of [t, d] by [i] and the borrowing of English loan words such
as ‘jam’.  Their incorporation into the mutation system indicates that they
have integrated into the sound system (this is discussed further in chapter
6).  Fricatives cover the whole gamut of the vocal tract with uvular [χ] in
the North to [ʒ] in borrowings.  Striking is the variable deletion of [v] and
[ð] word-finally as in ‘ffordd’ (road).  With respect to the vowels, the
inventory of monophthongs varies from dialect to dialect (Jones (1984) records
11 and Fynes-Clinton (1913) 13 for instance).  Hannahs, therefore, focusses on
the basic vowel inventories of the North and South.  Interestingly, there
exists a length difference which is contrastive only in stressed
monosyllables.  Unsurprisingly, the number of diphthongs differs from region
to region, with the South exhibiting eight and the North exhibiting 13 since
barred-i can serve as an off-glide there in addition to the normal high
offglides.  

Chapter 3 “Welsh Phonological Structures” begins the journey into the
super-segmental structure of the language.  To begin with, Welsh possesses a
minimality condition mandating that a monosyllabic content word must be
bimoraic.  In the case of open syllables with a monophthong, lengthening
occurs.  Lengthening does not occur in monosyllables, however, when the coda
consists of two or more consonants or of /p, t, k, m, ŋ/ alone (Williams
(1989), Wood (1988)).  These five consonants appear to count as moraic in coda
position.  This assumption is validated by the inability of a monosyllabic
word which ends in one of these five consonants from having a diphthongal
nucleus since a superheavy trimoraic syllable would result.  Apart from two
native words ‘cewc’ (glance) and ‘twym’ (warm) this appears to be true.  With
respect to phonotactics Welsh complex onsets and codas largely follow the
sonority hierarchy.  Other syllable-related impositions include the inability
of schwa to occur in word-final syllables, the interchange between [i] and [u]
with the glides [j] and [w] respectively, and the ability of sonorants in some
dialects to be the nucleus.  Finally, the morphophonology of the definite
article seemingly prioritizes codas over onsets, opting for the variant [r],
which is an enclitic on a preceding vowel-final word, over the variants ‘yr’
or ‘y’, yielding “o’r llyfr” (from the book) instead of “*o y llyfr” without
an extra coda (cf. Hannahs & Tallerman 2006).  The chapter delves next into a
discussion of stress.  Stress is predictably penultimate with the head of the
rightmost trochaic foot bearing main stress.   Certain exceptions do exist,
though, primarily due to loanwords or to specific suffixes, such as ‘-(h)ad’. 
Strikingly, the stressed penultimate syllable bears the stress accent while an
independent pitch accent falls on the final syllable.  The foot and prosodic
word round out the chapter, but since they serve as the centerpiece of
subsequent chapters the discussion is brief.

Chapter 4 “Phonological Processes” begins with a discussion of the
phonological position of schwa.  Hannahs concludes that it is a phoneme with
positional allophones (i.e. schwa and barred-i) and at the same time it is
also a positional allophone of [u].  Next Hannahs tackles vowel mutation in
which certain vocalic nuclei alternate between final-syllable form and
non-final syllable form (orthographically: ‘ai, au, aw, uw, w, y’ alternate
with ‘ei, eu, o, u, y, y’).  Since they are not productive processes but
largely diachronic artifacts, he limits the discussion to the monophthongs
which are more generally regular.  He lays out an OT account, revising his
earlier work (Hannahs 2007) taking into account results of Green (2007). 
Hannahs proposes that words with non-alternating barred-i have barred-i as
inputs while words with alternating barred-i have schwa as their input.  He
grounds these assumptions in learnability.  With respect to constraints he
needs only *Schwa-Final-Syllable, which militates against schwa in final
syllables, and Ident-IO-vowel features.  The chapter concludes with short
discussions of the mainly diachronic phenomena of vowel affection and
assimilation.

Chapter 5 “Foot-Based Phenomena” really shows the advantages of Hannahs’ use
of OT.  He begins by analyzing word-final clusters which do not follow
sonority sequencing, such as ‘pobl’ (people) and ffenestr’ (window).  What is
of interest is how these final clusters are handled by the phonology.  In some
an epenthetic vowel is inserted (pobl), in others, the final consonant is
deleted (ffenestr) and in still others metathesis occurs (‘ewythr’ (uncle)). 
Hannahs shows that the first group undergoes epenthesis in order to create a
binary foot.  The quality of the epenthetic vowel is determined by
‘BE-Ident-F’ adopted from Kitto and de Lacy (1999) which allows for the
epenthetic vowel to copy the vowel quality of the base.  The second group
deletes the final consonant in order to maintain a binary foot.  Finally, the
small third group is limited to the cluster ‘thr’ but it too preserves a
binary foot.  Hannahs then moves onto the realization of /h/.  It was long ago
realized that /h/ surfaces only when the onset of a stressed syllable or of a
word.  Hannahs, argues, however that a simple constraint stating that [h] must
be foot-initial fails to account for why Welsh has no other glottal sounds. 
For this reason he adopts the constraint *Glottal as well as a positional
faithfulness constraint Max-initial-h where /h/ occurs word-initial and
foot-initial.  Finally, the chapter closes with a discussion of
antepenultimate stress.

Chapter 6 “Initial Consonant Mutation” breaks the pattern of the immediately
preceding chapters and focusses on a topic which is more morphological than
anything.  Hannahs rejects a purely phonetic or phonological analysis of
mutations and adopts in spirit Green’s (2006, 2007) solution, in which for any
given lexical item, the radical form is linked to its various mutated forms in
the lexicon.  Hannahs’ ‘pattern extraction’ analysis crucially differs from
Green in maintaining that the link between the radical and mutated forms does
not consist of full lexical items but of the initial consonants only. 
Additionally, since no lexical material is involved in the linking, the
extracted pattern of consonantal links is not limited to the lexicon per se,
especially since some phonological subregularities exist between the effects
of various mutations (e.g. soft mutation changes voiceless stops into voiced
stops while aspirate mutations renders them voiceless fricatives).

Chapter 7 “Remaining Issues and Further Directions” touches on two topics
which would benefit from future research: provection and compounding. 
Provection is the ‘hardening’ of voiced stops into voiceless stops.  Two types
of provection occur in Welsh: one is the change of a voiced stop after a
stressed syllable in some dialects (Thomas 1988) and the other is at morpheme
boundaries, such as before superlative -haf.  With respect to compounding,
Welsh exhibits strict compounds on the one hand in which vowel mutations occur
across members and only one stress surfaces, versus loose compounds on the
other hand in which mutation is barred and both members retain their own
stress.  Which variables (be they morphological, phonological, or semantic)
are involved in the division of Welsh compounds is yet to be determined.

EVALUATION

This book does a superb job at covering the main topics which have been at the
forefront of the study of Welsh phonology over the past half-century.  Its
ample bibliography and descriptive precision make this a suitable starting
point for future research.  In particular aside from chapter 7, it is littered
with open questions throughout.  To give but two examples, in chapter 3 (p.
37) Hannahs discusses an odd pair of facts from northern Welsh.  Long vowels
are licit when before the coda cluster <llt> (also before sb, sg, st) but when
the coda consonant is <ll> alone, a long vowel is not permitted.  How can <ll>
be moraic when alone, but non-moraic as part of a cluster?  As a second
example, Hannahs concludes chapter 5 (pp. 115-119) with an analysis of
antepenultimate deletion.  In some trisyllabic words, the antepenultimate
syllable may be variably deleted (‘[y]sgolion’ (schools)), while in others
such deletion is not possible (‘hanesion’ (tales)).  Hannahs proposes that for
the former the antepenultimate syllable is unfooted and attached directly to
the prosodic word level.  In the latter, on the other hand, the
antepenultimate syllable is attached to a foot to create a superfoot, which
affords it protection from variable deletion.  It is this difference in level
of attachment which accounts for whether or not a syllable is variably deleted
or not.  While this solution accounts for the difference it by no means
explains why the vocabulary of trisyllabic words should be bifurcated the way
they are.  Is this just a diachronic artifact or is some as of yet unforeseen
trigger the cause?  One final area for future research is with respect to the
discussion of the realization of /h/ in chapter 5.  Hannahs adopts the
constraint Max-Initial-h where /h/ is word initial or foot initial.  Such
listing of contexts seems to me to be missing something.  What though, if
anything, is the question.

REFERENCES
Fynes-Clinton, O. H.  (1913).  “The Welsh Vocabulary of the Bangor District”. 
London: Oxford University Press.

Green, Antony.  (2006).  “The independence of phonology and morphology: the
Celtic mutations,” “Lingua” 116: 1946-85.

Green, Antony.  (2007).  “Phonology Limited”.  Potsdam: Universitätsverlag.

Hannahs, S.J.  (2007).  “Constraining Welsh vowel mutation,” “Journal of
Linguistics” 43.2: 341-63.

Hannahs, S. J. & Maggie Tallerman.  (2006).  “At the interface: selection of
the Welsh definite article,” “Linguistics” 44.4: 781-816.

Jones, Mari C.  (1998).  “Language Obsolescence and Revitalization: Linguistic
Change in Two Sociolinguistically Contrasting Welsh Communities”.  Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Kitto, Catherine & Paul de Lacy.  (1999).  “Correspondence and epenthetic
quality,” “Proceedings of AFLA” 4: 181-200.

Thomas, Siân Elizabeth.  (1988).  “A study of calediad in the upper Swansea
Valley,” in “The Use of Welsh” (ed. M. Ball): 85-96.  Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters.

Williams, Briony.  (1989).  “Stress in modern Welsh”.  PhD dissertation,
University of Cambridge.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jean-François Mondon is an assistant professor of Foreign Language at Minot
State University.  His research interests include Classical Armenian, Celtic
Linguistics, and Distributed Morphology.

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