6.914, Sum: Representing retroflex

[The Linguist List]

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-6-914. Thu Jun 29 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  179
 
Subject: 6.914, Sum: Representing retroflex
 
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---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------------
1)
Date:  Tue, 27 Jun 1995 21:13:00 CDT
From:  beaumont_brush at sil.org
Subject:  Sum: Representing Retroflex
 
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Tue, 27 Jun 1995 21:13:00 CDT
From:  beaumont_brush at sil.org
Subject:  Sum: Representing Retroflex
 
 
     Summary: Representing Retroflex
 
        At the beginning of the month I posted a query that asked for
     information on an alternative way of representing retroflexed segments
     as dorsalized coronals instead of [-anterior]. Warm thanks to those
     who responded:
 
     Philip Hamilton            phamilto at epas.utoronto.ca
     Richard Desrochers         desrochr at ERE.UMontreal.CA
     Wechsler                   Wechsler at world.std.com
     Suzanne Urbanczyk          suzanne at oitunix.oit.umass.edu
     Mark Verhijde              Mark.Verhyde at let.ruu.nl
     Stig Eliasson              Stig.Eliasson at ling.uu.se
 
     Here is a list of annotated references followed by contributors'
     excerpts on the following topics:
 
     1. Against Dorsalization
     2. Origins of Coronal Domination of Retroflex: Sanskrit evidence
     3. Phonetic features of Retroflex
 
     BLEVINS
        1994. Course notes from the 1994 Australian Linguistic
        Institute.
 
     CHO, Y.
        1990. Parameters of Consonantal Assimilation.
        PhD thesis Stanford
 
        About Sanskrit retroflexed elements. The claim made here is that
        retroflexation equals the formation of segments that contain two place
        nodes, COR and DOR, i.e. what some have defined as a "complex" place.
        Interestingly, in assuming retroflexed segments as having two place
        nodes, some neutralization effects at right word edges fall out quite
        naturally. (Verhijde)
 
     DIXON
        No title given.
        1980. Languages of Australia
 
        Assumes a feature [+retroflex], as does Hamilton's 1993 Toronto paper.
 
     ELIASSON, STIG
        1986.  Sandhi in Peninsular Scandinavian.
        In: Henning Andersen (ed.), Sandhi phenomena in the languages of Europe
,
        271-300. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
 
        Postalveolarization or retroflexion is a most important sandhi process
        in Swedish and Norwegian, and the major part of the above article
        is devoted to that problem. (Eliasson)
 
     GNANADESIKAN, AMALIA
        No title given.
        NELS 24
 
        1993. The feature geometry of coronal subplaces.
        University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 1993
 
        She argues against the feature [anterior] for defining coronals.
       I believe that retroflexes are represented as [-distributed]
       [+back] where [back] is dorsal. (Urbanczyk)
 
     HAMILTON, PHILIP
        1993. No title given
        ESCOL 93
 
        Paper on Coronal articulation
 
        1993. No title given
        Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 1993.
 
     KEATING, PATRICIA
        1991. Coronal places of articulation
        in The Special Status of Coronals, Paradis and Prunet, eds.
 
        Phonetic clues on coronal articulations
 
     PRINCE & SMOLENSKY
        1993:179, citing Kirchner's University of Maryland MA thesis.
 
 
     1. Against Dorsalization
 
        Hamilton: I am currently working on a paper where I argue against
     dorsalisation more fully, based on a variety of evidence: retroflexes
     are transparent to +back vowel harmony; all of the evidence for
     interaction between retroflexes and back vowels is from very low level
     phonetic facts (there are no lexical alternations backing front
     vowels: /rti/ going to [rtu]) and there is never _neutralisation_ of a
     lexical back/front contrast conditioned by retroflexes, all that is
     attested is that front vowels have backed allophones when beside a
     retroflex; retroflexes are based represented with a feature dependent
     on an apical node, since the lack of heteroganic apical clusters may
     be elegantly expressed with an OCP constraint on adjacent apical
     nodes.
 
     2. Origins of Coronal domination of retroflex: Sanskrit
 
        Wechsler: The presently-orthodox account of retroflection being
     dominated by the coronal node receives a lot of its support from the
     Sankrit "rnati" rule.  In this rule, if I recall it correctly, n -> rn
     anywhere to the right of a retroflex consonant, but intervening
     non-nasal alveolars block the rule.  This kind of interaction between
     retroflection and the coronal node appears in other places as well;
     the one I've studied is in Warlpiri, where historically there was a
     rule that partially unretroflexed a retroflex stop unless it was
     closely followed by another retroflex.
 
        There are other reasons why you might want to avoid involvement
     with the dorsal tier -- all the vowels live there, and you would have
     to explain why they are transparent to assimilations involving
     anteriority.  a
 
     3. Phonetic origins
 
        Desrocher: Ladefoged (1974 [1971]: Preliminaries...) speaks of
     retroflexes (RXs) as apical postalveolar and gives the example of Ewe.
     He adds: "In some South Asian languages the retroflex consonant
     involve only the tip of the tongue and the back of the alveolar ridge,
     whereas in others there is contact between a large part of the
     underside of the tongue tip and much of the forward part of the hard
     palate" and elsewhere, he speaks of the "extremely retroflex sounds
     which occur in some Indo-Aryan languages" (Hindi, Gujerati,
     Penjabi,and so on, I guess) and when characterizing everything with
     the SPE features, describes RXs as [-ant, +cor, +high, -back, -low,
     -dist].
 
        SPE refers to Zwicky (1965, his Dissert.) as describing
     convincingly Sanskrit s. as [-ant] (actually, [-comp]) and SPE seems
     to favor the natural class apicals + RXs [-dist] as opposed to
     laminals + non-RXs [+dist]. They refer for these matters to Ladefoged
     1964 A phonetic study of W-Afr Languages, and maintain that
     distinction between dentals and RXs support a [dist] feature.
 
        Malmberg (1974, Manuel de phonetique generale) writes that RXs
     are produced with the tongue markedly curved backwards towards the hard
     palate, but his diagram, as Ladefoged's, indicates that this the very
     front of the palate, or the back of the ridge, that is touched by the
     apex, and mentions South-Italians dialects and of course, India.
 
        Hockett 1958 makes an interesting comment: he says that the same
     acoustical effect than in the RX in "bird" is achieved by some English
     speakers not by curling back the tip, but by a "peculiar contour of the
     central part of the tongue, the tip being held behind the lowe teeth".
 
     Further comments, corrections, and questions welcome
     --Beau
 
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