27.2969, Review: Ling Theories; Phonetics; Phonology: Ridouane, van der Hulst, Rialland (2015)

Fri Jul 15 16:09:05 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2969. Fri Jul 15 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2969, Review: Ling Theories; Phonetics; Phonology: Ridouane, van der Hulst, Rialland (2015)

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Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:06:00
From: Janet Leonard [jleonard at uvic.ca]
Subject: Features in Phonology and Phonetics

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-2677.html

EDITOR: Annie  Rialland
EDITOR: Rachid  Ridouane
EDITOR: Harry  van der Hulst
TITLE: Features in Phonology and Phonetics
SUBTITLE: Posthumous Writings by Nick Clements and Coauthors
SERIES TITLE: Phonology and Phonetics [PP] 21
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Janet Leonard, University of Victoria

Reviews Editor: Robert A. Cote

SUMMARY

The book “Features in Phonology and Phonetics”, edited by Annie Rialland,
Rachid Ridouane and Harry van der Hulst is 280 pages long and consists of a
preface presenting George N. Clements' CV along with a celebration of his
contributions, both professional and personal, by Samuel Jay Keyser.  The
preface is followed by eight articles and an appendix of publications by
George N. Clements.  Specifically, this book presents the posthumous writings
of Nick Clements, his colleagues and students. It is organized into three
parts: part one is an introduction, part two presents two unpublished
manuscripts, and part three includes five articles on the contributions of
individual features to Feature Theory.  Each article includes its own set of
references. At the end of the book is a three page index of terms, relevant to
phonological and feature theory, used throughout the volume. The purpose of
this book is to situate Nick Clements' contributions to feature theory within
its historical and theoretical context and to introduce the reader to a
collection of some of his unpublished manuscripts and collaborative work.  

The first section of the book includes one article and an appendix. The
article is written by the editors of this volume and is titled ''Features in
Phonology and Phonetics: The contributions of George N. Clements''. This part
of the book places Clements ̓ work in the appropriate theoretical and
historical context and explains the kinds of research questions he was seeking
to answer.

The  ''Introduction''  runs through the history of the ''phoneme'' and
discusses how scholars such as Trobetzkoy and Jakobson classified
distinguished phonological contrasts by focussing on phonetic properties of
sounds (p. 4) and how these ideas were later published as Jakobson, Fant and
Halle (1952) and Jakobson and Halle (1956). These latter authors were the
first to posit a small set of distinctive features to describe the
phonological properties of sounds.  The features dealt with both the
articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sounds. Acoustic properties of
sound are seen as more important by Jackobson because the acoustic properties
of sound involve both the speaker and the hearer, whereas the articulatory
properties involve only the hearer. However, it is the proposed articulatory
properties that take a predominant role in the 20th century descriptions of
phonological features. Phonology features that are grounded in articulatory
phonetic descriptions make their initial appearance in the ''Sound Patterns of
English'' (Chomsky & Halle, 1968) and are the focus of the ''Motor Theory of
Speech Perception'' (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985) as well as ''Articulatory
Phonology'' (Browman & Goldstein, 1986). 

The appendix  included in part one of this book provides a list of
publications by George N. Clements. Five pages of references are presented.
These include books, journal articles, encyclopedia chapters, book chapters,
conference papers, book reviews and working papers. In total, there are 105
works listed.

In Part 2 of this book, the reader is introduced to Clements' (2009) own
research which is centred on five principles: feature bounding, feature
economy, marked feature avoidance, robustness and phonological enhancement.
These principles  are designed to define the broad properties of sound systems
cross-linguistically. This part of the book includes two unpublished
manuscripts. The first article in part 2 of this book is written by George N.
Clements and is titled ''The hierarchal representation of vowel height''. This
article presents a theory which characterises vowel height on the binary
feature [open] which is assigned at different tiers. The theory claims to
address problems inherent in early models of vowel height.  Some of the
solutions that this theory offers include the characterisation of vowel height
to a single feature, an account for vowel systems with more than three
heights, a reduction of the need for redundancy rules, a better account of
partial assimilation, and  accounts for the independence of height in some
processes. In sum, their prediction is that if these proposals are correct,
then the feature [open] can replace the features [high] and [low].

The second article in Part 2 of this book is co-authored by George N. Clements
and Rajesh Khawtiwada and is titled ''Co-occurrence constraints on aspirates
in Nepali''. In this article, the authors seek to extend MacEarchern's (1999)
typology of languages with aspirated sounds by comparing Nepali with Sanskrit
and Goijori. They find that the kinds of restrictions on co-occurring
aspirates in Nepali are consistent with an implicational hierarchy. They
conclude that although the co-occurring aspirates are rare in Nepali, the
language is not atypical with respect to the kind of consonant co-occurrences
expected in this group of languages. 

In Part 3 of this book, the reader is introduced to two views on the source of
phonological features. The first view is that phonological features are rooted
in language acquisition and arise from ''general cognitive principles of
categorization'' (p. 8) (see Blevins 2004; Mielke 2008). The other view is one
of innateness, which is the idea that phonological features are evolutionary
primes which have evolved for the ''specific purpose of language'' (p. 8) (see
Chomsky & Halle, 1986). Clements himself was primarily concerned with the
''relations distinctive features have to measurable physical properties'' (p.
8). In this section of the book Clements and his colleagues explore the
relationship between the cognitive principles of categorization and innateness
for the phonological features [tense], [strident], [nasal], [ATR] and
[pharyngeal] respectively. Providing for each feature a historical overview of
its phonological, articulatory, acoustic and perceptual properties, and
presenting proposals about the role of each feature in explaining how sounds
contrast across languages. 

EVALUATION

The articles in this book are particularly interesting and important because
they provide a solid background in Feature Theory, drawing on language
examples from a variety of the world's languages. Placing Clements' work
within its appropriate historical and theoretical context, this book is a must
read for researchers of phonology and Feature Theory. Crucially, the articles
in this book serve as excellent background material for anyone whose research
interest is concerned with the motivation of, historical use of, and the
phonological and phonetic grounding of features. In addition, the reader is
introduced to the theoretical framework and the kinds of questions about
phonological features that Clements, his colleagues, and his students were
seeking to answer. 

REFERENCES

Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary Phonology: The Emergence of Sound
Patterns. Cambridge

Browman, P. Catherine and Louis Goldstein. 1986. Towards an articulatory
phonology. In C.  Ewen and J. Anderson (eds.), Phonology Yearbook 3, 219-252.
Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press.

Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle (1986). The Sound Patterns of English. New
York. Harper  and Row.

Clements, G. Nick. 2009. The role of features in phonological inventories. In
Eric Raimy and  Charles Cairns, (eds.), Contemporary Views on Architecture and
Representation in  Phonological Theory: 19-68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Jakobson and Halle (1956). Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton. 

Jakobson, Roman, Gunner Fant and Morris Halle. 1952. Preliminaries to Speech
Analysis.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Acoustic Laboratory. 

Liberman Alvin. M. and Ignatius G. Mattingly. 1985. The motor theory of speech
perception  revised. Cognition. 21: 1-36. 

MacEarchern, Margaret. 1999. Laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions. New York:
Garland.

Mielke, Jeff. 2008. The Emergence of Distinctive Features. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

ABOUT THE REVIEWER<br />Janet Leonard is a PhD Candidate at the University of
Victoria. Her field of research is on the sound structure of SENĆOŦEN
(Saanich), a Northern Straits variety of an endangered Salish language spoken
on Vancouver Island, B.C. Canada. Her doctoral research seeks to identify,
describe and account for the phonetic, phonological and morphological
properties which govern the distribution and representation of SENĆOŦEN schwa.

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