[Lingtyp] papers on non-uniqueness in tone and stress
Erich Round
erichslists at gmail.com
Sat Feb 6 11:48:02 UTC 2021
Hi Adam,
These issues are all worth debating, and good we can do so on LingTyp.
I’d hope that a baseline expectation on LingTyp is that most contributors are well attuned to the difficulties, uncertainties, and conflicting demands of linguistic description. Even if someone doesn’t say this explicitly in a post, I wouldn’t take the absence of such a declaration to imply they were trivialising the issue. The phrase “carving a language at its joints” is an allusion to vexed arguments over “carving nature at its joints”, and therefore an acknowledgement that things are not so simple. Nevertheless, languages are systems, and those systems have discernible subparts that we all care about greatly (phonemes, parts of speech, constructions, etc.), but there may be more than one way to partition the whole. This is what I meant.
Regarding Archimedean points, I wouldn’t say that Canonical Typology is any more Archimedean than any other typological enterprise, (though I’d be keen to hear what’s led you to think it is). In Round & Corbett (2020), Grev and I discuss in detail the difficulty of grappling towards good canonical criteria, and the cycle of tackling new data, refining our measures, tackling new data, and so on. This was also emphasised by the earliest work in Autotypology (Bickel & Nichols 2002). In our paper, Grev and I go on to suggest methods to help do this, in a fashion which I would say sits quite well with Wimsatt (at least, what I’ve read by him). We also emphasise how the method allows us to relate work in CT to traditional categories, while moving beyond them to more detailed typologies. The point of a CT analysis is not to find the “canonical X”, but rather the idea of a “canonical X” is used as a tool along the way, to help tease apart many of the ways in which phenomena vary. It’s those resulting dimensions of comparison, and the use of them to characterise variation in a multidimensional fashion, that are the result. We discuss this in our paper. So I think your characterisation here misses the mark a bit. That said, it’s useful to discuss and have the chance to clarify matters!
Best,
Erich
Bickel, Balthasar, and Johanna Nichols. 2002. “Autotypologizing Databases and Their Use in Fieldwork.” In Proceedings of the International LREC Workshop on Resources and Tools in Field Linguistics, Las Palmas, edited by Peter Austin, Helen Dry, and Peter Witternburg. Nijmegen: ISLE and DOBES.
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu>
Date: Saturday, 6 February 2021 at 6:43 pm
To: Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>
Cc: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] papers on non-uniqueness in tone and stress
Thanks for all of the replies,
While I certainly appreciate the sources provided (Natalia's paper is right on the nose regarding my question), Erich's comments seem to assume that it is possible to do language comparison without any simplifying assumptions. It's as if the logical space that emerges from canons provides an unbiased Archimedean vantage point, with no potential to reify traditional categories (I would really question this - consider Spencer and Luis' notion of canonical clitic). There also seems to be an exaggeration of our ability to directly get at the reality of individual languages ("cut languages at the joints"), trivializing all the difficulties in getting the facts right, the real difficulty that many data gathering techniques themselves have biases that result in dangers of misinterpretation (calques from the contact language in the case of elicitation, misinterpretation of the context with naturalistic speech, top-down hallucinations in the domain of the phonetics-phonology interface, an inability to untangle or measure confounds in phonetic measurements), and the fact that (unbeknownst to the well meaning typologist) many of the posited 'diagnostics', 'typological variables' and even 'comparative concepts' are ambiguous in their interpretation and descriptivists are sometimes pushed towards "just picking one" of these interpretations lest we be called out as misunderstanding the literature.
Here I would endorse the work by philosopher William Wimsatt, who has worked on developing a philosophy of heuristics for scientific inference, and the anthropologist Matei Candea. I think the points made in these works resonate with Martin's views to a certain extent.
Wimsatt, William. 2007. Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise approximations to reality. Harvard University Press.
Candea, Matei. 2019. Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method. Cambridge University Press.
best,
Adam
On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 6:24 PM Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de<mailto:martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>> wrote:
Thanks, Erich! Yes, it's true that comparative concepts "do not address the issue of non-unique analysis", because they are not about analysis, but about classification.
Linguists often conflate these two things – they say things like "I analyze phenomenon X as Y", where "Y" is a category known from some other language. But this works only if Y is assumed to be an innate building block.
So if one invokes phenomena that are also found in other languages, one should say "I classify X as Y". And I think that classification can and should be unique (unlike analysis), because the classificatory categories are defined in such a way that they apply equally everywhere. (They are "cookie-cutters" whose shape and size is not dependent on the dough, to use Erich's apt metaphor.)
What Round (2019) apparently attempts to do is to have it both ways: "carve languages at their joints", but in a way that still allows comparison, by "choosing judiciously" among different (equally possible) analyses. I fear that such "judicious choices" may introduce too much subjectiveness (criteria selection bias, as Tallman 2021 calls it: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005720).
Erich is absolutely right that by choosing "cookie-cutter"-type comparative concepts (e.g. WALS-type category-like concepts, or parallel text passages, or Nijmegen-style visual stimuli), one incurs "the cost of losing sight of the systems being characterised" – except that "losing sight" suggests that one could do both things simultaneously.
I'm not sure whether there is a "growing consensus", though. I replied to Himmelmann's 2019 paper here: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2447, and I will reply to the critical comments on my "General linguistics" paper (mostly by generative linguists such as David Adger: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005691) next month. It still seems to me that the main lack of consensus is between advocates of innate building blocks and everyone else.
Martin
Am 05.02.21 um 08:37 schrieb Erich Round:
Hi all,
Martin Haspelmath writes,
different issues here: … (iii) how one links language-particular phenomena to comparative concepts; Erich Round's paper on “Australian Phonemic Inventories Contributed to PHOIBLE 2.0” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3464333 is a clear example of this last type.
This misconstrues what the study does altogether, but it also raises a point worth delving into, so thanks to Martin in the spirit of zigzagging towards the light:
Round (2019) considers the language-internal analyses of a large sample of Australian languages. Relevant to Adam’s topic, phonemic analysis is famously non-unique, and a given language typically allows multiple possible analyses. To put it another way, there are multiple ways to carve a sound system at its joints. Round (2019) chooses among these multiple, possible, language-internal analyses, endeavouring to ensure that the principles of the analysis are comparable across languages. Thus, when languages in the dataset do differ, those differences are more likely to reflect empirical differences in the languages themselves, rather than artifactual differences due to linguists doing phonemicisation differently. As Larry Hyman (2017:144) puts it so well, “we aim to typologize the linguistic properties, not the linguists”. Discussion of this kind of typological data preparation is relatively prominent within phonology: see Hyman (2017), van der Hulst (2017), Kiparksy (2018), and of course Ian Maddieson’s (1984) classic study which treats the issue with great care.
In contrast, Comparative Concepts (CC’s) do not seem to me to address the issue of non-unique analysis, because they don’t seek to characterise languages in their own terms. CC’s, in Haspelmath’s sense, are like cookie-cutters that slice through languages, picking out a predetermined shape chosen by the analyst (so that we can ask what we find within it); they deliberately don’t carve languages at their joints. Round (2019) does carve languages at their joints, only it admits that there are many ways to do so, and attempts to choose judiciously among them, given the aim of constructing a dataset that aids insightful comparison and typologising.
Why is this important to many typologists? Because we regard languages as organised systems, and want to understand them as such. A challenge, though, is that complex systems admit of multiple different characterisations. Typological methods which attend to this challenge of multiple analysis / non-uniqueness seek to ameliorate the distractions and illusions that can be thrown up by different choices of analysis, while still remaining committed to studying the system. CC’s in Haspelmath’s sense offer the promise of reducing variation in analysis, but at the cost of losing sight of the systems being characterised. Whether that is a cost worth bearing is evidently still a matter of contention in current-day typology.*
Best,
Erich
* Though the growing consensus is, it’s perfectly possible to do good typology without paying it. Bickel 2021, Round & Corbett 2020, Spike 2020 and Himmelmann 2019 all make this point from separate angles.
New references (other references are in my earlier post, below):
Bickel, Balthasar. 2021. “Beyond Universals and Particulars in Language: A Reply to Haspelmath (2021).” https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005707.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2019. Against trivializing language description (and comparison). Under review.
https://ifl.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/prof-himmelmann/publikationen
Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spike, Matthew. 2020. “Fifty Shades of Grue: Indeterminate Categories and Induction in and out of the Language Sciences.” Linguistic Typology 24(3):465-488. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2020-2061
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de><mailto:martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>
Date: Thursday, 4 February 2021 at 11:32 pm
To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org"<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] papers on non-uniqueness in tone and stress
It seems that there are at least three different issues here:
(i) whether all speakers of a language have the same system even when their conventional behaviour is identical; there happens to be an example of indeterminacy in the latest issue of Phonological Data and Analysis (see Matthew Gordon's earlier message):
Bennett, W. G., & Braver, A. (2020). Different speakers, different grammars: Productivity and representation of Xhosa labial palatalization. Phonological Data and Analysis, 2(6), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.3765/pda.v2art6.9
(ii) on what basis one decides between different analyses of a language-particular system; e.g. Schane's (1968) example of English [spin], which can be phonemicized as /sbin/ (with phonetic devoicing of /b/ after sibilant) or /spʰin/ (with phonetic deaspiration in the same environment).
(iii) how one links language-particular phenomena to comparative concepts; Erich Round's paper on “Australian Phonemic Inventories Contributed to PHOIBLE 2.0” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3464333 is a clear example of this last type. It seems that the issue in Chácobo that Adam Tallman mentioned ("tone" vs. "stress") also falls in this category.
Phonologists do not always distinguish between (ii) and (iii) (particular description vs. general comparison), as pointed out prominently by Lass (1984) and Simpson (1999) (cited by Erich). But Kiparsky (2018) (also cited by Erich) explicitly rejects the distinction – I have argued against Kiparsky here: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1817.
Best,
Martin
Am 04.02.21 um 13:28 schrieb Erich Round:
Hi Adam,
I’ve enjoyed the conversations you’ve sparked here on the list recently, please keep them coming!
Thanks for raising an important topic. I have some paper suggestions below. I’d start by saying, though, that you might be getting formal phonologists wrong. Generative theorists from the start were well aware of the non-uniqueness problem, and that’s one reason why they were so keen on metrics to evaluate multiple candidate grammars. Now, that’s not to say it proved to be plain sailing, but there’s a deep appreciation of the problem buried in the theory, even if for practical purposes much theoretical work (just like much typological work) assumes only one analysis in order to get some other task completed in a finite amount of time. In optimality theory, the notion of Richness of the base is one new-ish incarnation of attempts to deal with the matter.
Canonical Typology (Corbett 2005, Round and Corbett 2020) provides the conceptual tools for asking not just whether ‘the best analysis’ is A, B or C, but to what extent, in multiple different regards, A, B and C differ and therefore can be considered (dis)advantageous in different ways. This helps us clarify why and how multiple analyses arise in the first place. My forthcoming chapter (2021) on phonotactics in Australian languages discusses this with respect to complex segments; Kwon & Round (2015) discuss it with respect to phonaesthemes; my review (2017) of Gordon’s Phonological Typology (2016) discusses the idea of doing typology over a distribution of possible analyses (which I term ‘factorial analysis’) and points out some places where Gordon’s own work covertly does this when confronted with non-uniqueness. Parncutt (2015) applies the idea to reduplication, and a current PhD student of mine, Ruihua Yin presented some of her fascinating results regarding sonority sequencing at the Australian Linguistics Society conference in December; her thesis should be finished early this year, and will be a major undertaking in this kind of typology. Round (2019) discusses how I addressed the issue of non-uniqueness when compiling a typologically nuanced set of 400 Australia phoneme inventories for Phoible. Natalia Kuznetsova’s work (2019) is relevant to prosody and responds to Hyman’s (2006) classic paper. Other serious discussions of the issue from various angles, typically very thoughtful and some quite in-depth are: Hockett 1963, Lass 1984, Simpson 1999, Hyman 2007, 2008, 2017, Dresher 2009, van der Hulst 2017, Kiparksy 2018.
Best,
Erich
Corbett, Greville G. 2005. “The Canonical Approach in Typology.” In Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories, edited by Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges, and David S Rood, 25–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dresher, B. Elan. 2009. The Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gordon, Matthew K. 2016. Phonological Typology. Oxford University Press.
Hockett, Charles F. 1963. “The Problem of Universals in Language.” In Universals of Language, edited by Joseph Greenberg, 1–29.
Hyman, Larry. 2006. “Word-Prosodic Typology.” Phonology 23: 225–57.
Hyman, Larry M. 2007. “Where’s Phonology in Typology?” Linguistic Typology 11: 265–71.
Hyman, Larry M. 2008. “Universals in Phonology.” The Linguistic Review 25: 83–137.
Hyman, Larry M. 2017. “What (Else) Depends on Phonology?” In Dependencies in Language, edited by Nicholas Enfield, 141–58.
Kiparsky, Paul. 2018. “Formal and Empirical Issues in Phonological Typology.” In Phonological Typology, edited by Larry M. Hyman and Frans Plank, 54–106. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Kuznetsova, Natalia. 2019. What Danish and Estonian can show to a modern word-prosodic typology. In Goedemans, R., Heinz, J., & van der Hulst, H. (Eds.). The study of word stress and accent: Theories, methods and data. CUP.
Kwon, Nahyun, and Erich R. Round. 2015. “Phonaesthemes in Morphological Theory.” Morphology 25 (1): 1–27.
Lass, Roger. 1984. “Vowel System Universals and Typology: Prologue to Theory.” Phonology Yearbook 1: 75–111.
Parncutt, Amy. 2015. “Towards a Phonological Typology of Reduplication in Australian Languages.” Honours Thesis, University of Queensland.
Round, Erich R. 2017. “Review of Gordon, Matthew K. Phonological Typology, OUP 2016.” Folia Linguistica 51 (3): 745–55.
Round, Erich R. 2019. “Australian Phonemic Inventories Contributed to PHOIBLE 2.0: Essential Explanatory Notes.” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3464333.
Round, Erich R. forthcoming 2021. “Phonotactics.” In Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, edited by Claire Bowern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23022.13120
Round, Erich R., and Greville G. Corbett. 2020. “Comparability and Measurement in Typological Science: The Bright Future for Linguistics.” Linguistic Typology 24 (3): 489–525.
Simpson, Adrian P. 1999. “Fundamental Problems in Comparative Phonetics and Phonology: Does UPSID Help to Solve Them.” In Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1:349–52. Berkeley: University of California.
Van der Hulst, Harry. 2017. “Phonological Typology.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and Robert MW Dixon, 39–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of TALLMAN Adam <Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr><mailto:Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr>
Date: Thursday, 4 February 2021 at 9:20 pm
To: VAN DE VELDE Mark <Mark.VANDEVELDE at cnrs.fr><mailto:Mark.VANDEVELDE at cnrs.fr>, "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org"<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] papers on non-uniqueness in tone and stress
Thanks, yes, I've read this paper.
Adam
Adam James Ross Tallman (PhD, UT Austin)
ELDP-SOAS -- Postdoctorant
CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
Bureau 207, 14 av. Berthelot, Lyon (07)
Numero celular en bolivia: +59163116867
________________________________
De : Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>] de la part de Mark Van de Velde [mark.vandevelde at cnrs.fr<mailto:mark.vandevelde at cnrs.fr>]
Envoyé : jeudi 4 février 2021 11:57
À : lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Objet : Re: [Lingtyp] papers on non-uniqueness in tone and stress
Dear Adam:
I can recommend Hyman (2012).
All the best,
Mark
Hyman, Larry M. 2012. In defense of prosodic typology: A response to Beckman and Venditti. Linguistic Typology. De Gruyter Mouton 16(3). 341–385. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity-2012-0014.
On 04/02/2021 11:12, TALLMAN Adam wrote:
Hello all,
I'm looking for papers on the notion of non-uniqueness in phonology (or morphosyntax if applicable). I have three so far (Chao, Hockett, and Schane).
I'm particularly interesting in non-uniqueness in the domain of the description of suprasegmentals - like when we have a system that seems to mix tone and (other types of) prominence whether the system should be described as tonal with a stress mapped to it or vice versa. Phonologists discuss the issue as if there is an obvious unique best way of describing such relations in all cases. But I think that's probably false and it choosing one over the other just amounts to an expositional decision - some of the discussion in Tallman and Elias-Ulloa (2020) point in this direction in Chácobo.
There's also the related issue of when the acoustic correlates of some phonological category are organized in such a way as to genuinely merit the designation "tone". Phonologists seem to assume that this issue is trivial or obvious - again, I think this is probably false (the notion is more open ended than is recognized) regardless of the phonological evidence that can be rallied in support of one position or another.
@Article{chao:1934:phonemes,
title = {The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems},
author = {Yuen Ren Chao},
journal = {Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica},
year = {1934},
volume = {4},
number = {},
pages = {363-397},
%doi = {},
%urldate = {},
}
@incollection{hockett:1963:universals,
Author = {Charles F. Hockett},
Booktitle = {Universals of language (Volume 2)},
Editor = {Joseph H. Greenberg},
Pages = {1-29},
Publisher = {MIT Press},
Address = {Cambridge, MA},
Title = {The problem of universals in language},
Year = {1963},
Edition = {}}
@Article{schane:1968:nonuniqueness,
title = {On the non-uniqueness of phonological representations},
author = {Sanford A. Schane},
journal = {Language},
year = {1968},
volume = {44},
number = {4},
pages = {363-397},
%doi = {},
%urldate = {},
}
@Article{tallman:eliasulloa:2020:acoustics,
title = {The acoustic correlates of stress and tone in Chácobo (Pano)},
author = {Adam J.R. Tallman},
journal = {The acoustic correlates of stress and tone in Chácobo (Pano): A production study},
editor = {Adam J.R. Tallman and José Élias-Ulloa},
year = {2020},
volume = {147},
number = {4},
pages = {3028},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0001014},
%urldate = {2019-07-04},
}
Adam
Adam James Ross Tallman (PhD, UT Austin)
ELDP-SOAS -- Postdoctorant
CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
Bureau 207, 14 av. Berthelot, Lyon (07)
Numero celular en bolivia: +59163116867
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