34.3215, Review: Coarticulation in Phonology: Zellou (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3215. Mon Oct 30 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3215, Review: Coarticulation in Phonology: Zellou (2023)

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Date: 30-Oct-2023
From: Dmitrii Zelenskii [dz-zd at mail.ru]
Subject: Phonetics, Phonology: Zellou (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3196

AUTHOR: Georgia Zellou
TITLE: Coarticulation in Phonology
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Dmitrii Zelenskii

SUMMARY
This monograph, with the deceptively broad title “Coarticulation in
Phonology”, is a description of two experiments on anticipatory nasal
coarticulation in American (effectively, Californian) English
performed by the author on undergraduate students, one on production
and one on perception. These students were without any visual or
hearing impairment, and received course credit for their
participation. The participant sets were non-intersecting, and
Experiment 2 used (truncated) material produced by the participants of
Experiment 1: participants of Experiment 1 produced CVC, CVN, or NVN
syllables, and CVC and CVN syllables were truncated to CV and then
presented to participants of Experiment 2 with a forced choice
question between the two options.

Aside from mandatory things like a reference list and acknowledgments
(which are, unusually, placed in the end of the book), the book
consists of four parts: an introduction, which provides an extensive
bibliographical review of coarticulation before abruptly jumping to
what the experiments are about, Experiment 1, Experiment 2, and the
concluding chapter “General Discussion and Future Directions”. Each
experiment chapter also has a (rather long) introductory part of its
own before the experiment description, with a description of similar
experiments in the past; said part lacks a subcaption in both cases.

The general idea of this monograph, building on the author’s previous
works, is to argue that “speakers have unique articulatory-gestural
representations for coarticulation that vary from the community mean
in idiosyncratic ways” (p. 35), used in both production and
perception; in particular, “American English vowels in oral consonant
contexts are grammatically represented as oral” (p. 47, rather than
underspecified). Experiment 1 showed that speakers vary widely in how
much coarticulatory nasalization they produce (although for each
speaker taken in isolation, CVC < CVN < NVN held), allowing general
classification into three roughly equal (23, 16, and 21 speakers out
of 60) piles of “Mechanical”, “Phonologized”, and “Enhancer”
coarticulators, depending on how their coarticulation interacts with
their speech rate (less, same, or more coarticulation as the rate gets
slower, respectively). Experiment 2 showed that the classification of
the “talker” (i.e., the one who had pronounced the truncated syllable
in Experiment 1)  into one of the three piles is highly predictive in
regards to how the truncated syllable will be classified, “[a]bove and
beyond the contribution of the coarticulatory patterns within a given
token” (p. 42). “Enhancers”, however, were surprising for the author
in that their tokens showed worse results for identification of CVN
syllables, not better, possibly due to some r features that weren’t
controlled for, such as prosody.

EVALUATION
This book shows a strange combination of undeniably thorough work and
systematic mishaps.

Technical mishaps:The book uses outdated “scientific we” referencing
the (single) author; at the same time, references to the author’s own
work were not de-anonymized, resulting in the fact that the same
person is referenced as “she” on p. 15 (instead of using first person
singular pronouns in both cases).
Original, non-summarized data were not provided in a readable form
(such as a table) in the book, despite the book format allowing that;
this also meant that a reviewer (or any other interested reader)
cannot easily recheck the statistical calculations whose results were
provided in the book.
The Acknowledgments section, aside from being, unusually, placed in
the end, after even references, looks like this: “Many thanks to
editor Patrycja Strycharczuk and two anonymous reviewers for their
helpful comments and feedback” (p. 64; this is the full text!). This
looks like something one writes when one doesn’t want to write that
section but someone forces it.
In Figure 3, for speaker S086, standard error bars of the mean for CVC
and CVN merged; unless this is meant to indicate that their ends
exactly coincided, which is not tenable, they need better
highlighting. (A similar but lesser problem concerns CVN and NVN for
S079 in the same Figure: the lower bars are distinct but the higher
ones aren’t.)

Structural mishaps:
The book overpromises. With the ambitious title “Coarticulation in
Phonology” and the bird’s eye view discussion of coarticulation in the
introduction, one would expect a general discussion of what
coarticulation is and how it works, with phonological representations
and larger theoretical implications. What we get instead is a merger
of what could have been two articles on two related experiments on one
particular kind of coarticulation (nasal spreading from an alveolar
nasal consonant to a neighboring vowel, with focus on the case when
the consonant is in the coda of the vowel’s syllable), coupled with a
bibliographical review. While the experiments might have implications
for the theory of coarticulation in phonology, as the fourth chapter
claims, they are not said theory itself, and the work has no business
to stand alongside such titles as, say, “Explanation in Phonology”
(Kiparsky, 1982) or “Phonetics in phonology” (Ladd, 2011).
While the bibliographical review is comprehensive, it is badly
structured. Not only is it effectively split between the first
chapter, the nameless introductory parts of the second and third
chapters, and a number of additional remarks in the conclusion, its
structure in the introduction specifically also leaves much room for
improvement. The introduction is split into four numbered sections:
“Phonological Explanations for Coarticulatory Variation”, “The Role of
Coarticulation in Diachronic Change”, “Individual Differences in
Phonological Grammars for Coarticulation”, and “Current Study”.
However, the content of the first three subparts does not in any
obvious way follow from their names. For instance, the second section
contains a rather long-winded introduction into exemplary phonology
models, with a quite tenuous link to sound change, and said
introduction continues across the section boundary to section three.

Scientific mishaps:
“Storing” is equated to “phonologizing”. While the experiments’
results may serve as evidence for the coarticulatory details being
stored and used in both perceptual predictions and production, they do
not prove that this storage is part of phonology, either of universal
or of language-specific knowledge rather than of learnt knowledge on
the phonetic interface part, which is likely to be consistent across
one speaker’s use of different languages. At one place, we even find
the statement that “precise experimental analysis can inform which
phonetic differences are “phonological” (i.e., broadly meaning that
they reflect learned and controlled variation)” (p. 3), showing either
misunderstanding or lack of interest in or agreement on what phonology
is and how it relates to phonetic detail. Cf. Ladd’s (2011) discussion
of different ways to relate phonology and phonetics.
Likewise, “systematically” is equated to “deliberately”, and the
closest we find to a defense of that is “This is consistent with the
notion that phonologized coarticulation is deliberate and reflects
active maintenance of coarticulatory cues on the vowel” (p. 48). There
is no argument whatsoever that anything deliberate - in the sense of
“I deliberately chose to say ‘dog’ not ‘retriever’” - is going on, and
this would be quite surprising, yet the book attempts to basically
pull the surprising idea in with evidence that does not support it.
Across-speaker variation is presented as a “new and exciting”
discovery that supposedly goes against the received wisdom. However,
if information about a speaker’s language is stored in the brain and
the transmission mechanisms are inexact (both more-or-less uncontested
postulates, at least insomuch as synchronic linguistics has any
uncontested postulates), high across-speaker variation in things that
are not easily tracked and corrected, such as precise degrees of
coarticulation, is the null hypothesis, and treatment of any language
as monolithic in that regard is at best a simplification.
Nowhere in the statistical measures is median reported to be used,
meaning that the means used as evidence can be strongly distorted by
outliers (the term “outlier” does not even appear in the book,
suggesting the author never worried about it).

Overall, the book can be recommended as long as one takes it for what
it is - a narrow study of a specific pattern with some daring attempts
at drawing implications from said study, not a general introduction
into how coarticulation is represented in phonology. It may turn out,
however, that this thorough work on the narrow question was
essentially for nothing, due to the (non-technical) mishaps listed
above.

REFERENCES

Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. Explanation in Phonology. Dordrecht: Foris
Publications.

Ladd, D. Robert. 2011. Phonetics in phonology // John Goldsmith, Jason
Riggle, Alan Yu (eds.). The handbook of phonological theory. 2nd
edition. Malden, Oxford, Chichester: Blackwell. P. 348-373.

NB: Other than that, no new references are added; for what “the
author’s previous works” and “exemplary phonology models” refer to,
see the original.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dmitrii Zelenskii holds a Master’s degree with honours (as well as a
Bachelor’s degree) in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics from
Lomonosov Moscow State University. He specializes in formal phonology
and morphology, building up a theory of postcyclic (i.e. cycle-less)
generative phonology while also exploring other parts of the
externalization interface. Languages he has worked on include Barguzin
Buryat, standard Finnish, Russian, Ancient Greek, Latin, and English.
Due to the political situation in Russia steadily worsening, he
currently resides in Israel, seeking to continue his scientific
inquiries further. His academic works can be found at https://moscowst
ate.academia.edu/%D0%94%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9%D0%97%D0%B
5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9.



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