16.577, Review: Phonology/Phonetics: van de Weijer et al. (2003)

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Subject: 16.577, Review: Phonology/Phonetics: van de Weijer et al. (2003)

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1)
Date: 25-Feb-2005
From: Michael Maxwell < maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu >
Subject: The Phonological Spectrum: Volume I: Segmental structure 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 16:26:06
From: Michael Maxwell < maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu >
Subject: The Phonological Spectrum: Volume I: Segmental structure 
 

EDITORS: van de Weijer, Jeroen; van Heuven, Vincent J.; van der Hulst, Harry
TITLE: The Phonological Spectrum
SUBTITLE: Volume I: Segmental Structure
SERIES: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 233
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-771.html


Michael Maxwell, Linguistic Data Consortium / University of Pennsylvania

The preface (p. vii) to the two volume work (only the first volume is reviewed 
here) states the aim as "giving a comprehensive overview of current 
developments in phonological theory." That is a tall order, and not one that 
this volume delivers with respect to segmental phonology.  Only a few 
themes are covered: three papers each on nasal harmony and voicing 
assimilation, and a single paper each on diphthongs, lenition and signed 
languages. While some of these topics might serve as stand-ins for others 
(nasal harmony for vowel harmony, for instance), in fact the range of 
approaches discussed is rather limited. If you want a "comprehensive 
overview", you will be better served by a handbook.

Moreover, the papers on nasal spreading are flawed by misreadings of the 
primary data and by focusing on un-affixed words, as I will discuss below.  
But if this work does not succeed in its avowed aim, there are still some 
interesting papers.  The editors give a rather short but useful overview of 
the papers in this volume; I will attempt a closer look at some of the issues 
raised.

The first two papers, by Paul Boersma and Rachel Walker, discuss nasal 
harmony systems, and in particular the question of so-called 'transparent' 
segments.  Languages allow a range of nasal spreading varying across a set 
of segments ranging from none (languages which do not evidence nasal at 
all) through adjacent vowels, glides, liquids, and voiced stops.  In each case, 
all the intermediate segments are nasalized; spreading can thus be viewed 
as local.  But an issue arises in the extreme case in which spreading is 
alleged to cross voiceless obstruents, but where these obstruents remain 
unaffected: they are apparently transparent to nasal spreading.

Under the theory of autosegmental phonology, spreading between non-
adjacent phonemes has often been accounted for by assuming that at the 
relevant feature nodes are in fact adjacent at some level.  For various 
reasons, Boersma and Walker prefer a different solution.  Boersma 
approaches the data from the standpoint of his theory of "Functional 
Phonology", which relies on the difference between production and 
perception.  In one group of languages, ostensibly united by a constellation 
of properties, nasal spreading is said to be based on spreading of the 
articulation, while in a second group of languages, with different 
properties, spreading is said to be based on perceptual harmony.  It is in 
the latter set of languages that so-called transparent segments are found.  
Boersma makes an analogy to vision: if we see a car behind a lamppost, we 
don't perceive two cars, but only one. Nasality is the same: we hear 
nasalization on two non-adjacent phonemes, with a non-nasalized stop 
between, and the stop is perceived as not breaking the nasalization.

For her part, Walker uses an extended version of Sympathy Theory (itself an 
extension of Optimality Theory) to argue that nasal spreading does target 
voiceless obstruents in the optimal candidate, but that in fact the obstruents 
are skipped by virtue of a Sympathetic candidate.

Walker considers a possible counter-argument to her analysis: why are the 
only attested transparent segments voiceless obstruents, which are the only 
consonants that would be unnasalizable? That is, why are there no 
languages where, say, voiced obstruents do not block nasal spreading, but 
also do not nasalize? She attributes this apparent coincidence to the rarity 
of opacity in general, which I do not find convincing.

Boersma and Walker both draw heavily on the literature of Tucanoan 
languages, particularly Tuyuca.  But in my opinion, both analyses have a 
serious flaw: the authors restrict attention to monomorphemic words.  
Tuyuca, like the other Tucanoan languages, is highly agglutinative, and 
nasal spreading as a process is only observable in suffixed forms.  What 
Walker and Boersma refer to as nasal spreading in Tuyuca is really only a 
generalization about the form of monomorphemic stems.

Nasalization in Tuyuca is described in detail in a paper by Barnes 1996, 
which is cited by Walker, but not by Boersma. Briefly, the facts are these: 
stems, which are virtually all bisyllabic, are either wholly nasal or wholly 
oral. Nasalization tends to spread to the right from a nasal stem onto 
suffixes.  (Tucanoan languages have few if any prefixes.) But suffixes, 
unlike stems, have a three-way contrast: some suffixes are inherently nasal, 
and condition nasal spreading to their right, regardless of the presence or 
absence of nasalization to their left; some suffixes are inherently oral, and 
block further spreading of nasalization; and some undergo nasalization 
when they appear to the right of a nasalized vowel, allowing that 
nasalization to spread further.  If this three-way contrast were 
phonologically predictable (e.g. by the segmental composition of the 
suffixes), this would be of interest, but not perhaps surprising.

But -- and this is the crucial point -- the membership of a suffix in one of 
these classes is largely unpredictable, as Barnes takes pains to document.  
In suffixes, voiceless obstruents plus /b/ and /d/ block spreading of 
nasalization from morphemes to their left (although some affixes 
beginning with voiceless obstruents have an inherently nasal vowel to the 
right of that obstruent, giving the illusion that the obstruent is 
transparent).  Beyond this generalization, nothing more can be said.  
Suffixes which consist of a single vowel, with no consonant at all, may in 
fact resist nasal spreading.  Minimal pairs, and even minimal triplets, of 
suffixes exist, where the only difference lies in the nasality or nasalizability 
of the suffixes.  Nor do such distinctions as inflectional vs. derivational 
suffixes have any predictive power.

The process of nasal spreading across morpheme boundaries onto suffixes 
in Tuyuca thus differs from the putative spreading within monomorphemic 
stems in three ways:

(1) Whether spreading affects a suffix cannot, in general, be predicted by 
the phonological content of the suffix, with the following two exceptions:

(2) Voiceless obstruents are not transparent to spreading; rather, all 
suffixes containing voiceless obstruents block the process of spreading.

(3) Not all consonants which have nasal counterparts allow spreading.  In 
particular, the voiced stops /b/ and /d/ block spreading in all suffixes in 
which they appear, despite the existence of the phonemes /m/ and /n/.  
(The velar stop /g/, on the other hand, does allow spreading in a lexically 
determined set of suffixes.)

Similar facts are well documented in several Tucanoan languages, and pose 
a problem for any theory which attempts to derive the facts of nasal 
spreading across morpheme boundaries from the phonological form of 
affixes.  The failure of either Boersma or Walker to address the process of 
nasal spreading in suffixes is thus a puzzling omission. In fact their 
analyses account for nothing more than the nasalization properties of 
stems, facts which at least potentially require no explanation at all, since 
there are no alternations, and the stems could simply be lexically listed with 
nasalization on all the relevant segments. Alternatively, one might account 
for the uniform properties of stem nasality by means of Morpheme 
Structure Conditions.

Stefan Ploch addresses a different issue, claiming that the phonologically 
nasality of a phoneme cannot be determined simply by phonetic 
measurement.  Rather, the property of being nasal is a cognitive property, 
and the status of phonological nasalization can only be determined from 
the contrasts a language employs, and from its phonotactic constraints.  
Ploch casts his argument in the context of the 'Element Theory' of 
phonology (Kaye et al.  1985), but the conclusion is compatible with a 
variety of theories, including structuralist phonology.

While I am in essential agreement with Ploch on the status of phonological 
features such as nasalization, there are a number of problems with his 
arguments.  First, one of Ploch's arguments draws on work by Entenman to 
the effect that in order to be perceived as nasal, low vowels need a larger 
velopharyngeal opening than do high vowels.  From this he concludes that 
nasalization cannot be defined as velic opening.  While this does imply that 
the property of being nasalized cannot be derived from a single phonetic 
property, it is unclear that phonological nasalization could not be derived 
from a constellation of phonetic properties.

Ploch also argues against a claim by Kawasaki which calls on perceptual 
cues to explain the origin of certain phonological processes of 
denasalization.  Specifically, since the oral/nasal distinction is hard to hear 
on vowels, the (partial) denasalization of nasal consonants before oral 
vowels enhances the detection of the oral/nasal distinction on the following 
vowel, and is therefore to be expected.

Some of the data Ploch relies on to counter-exemplify Kawasaki's claim 
comes from an analysis of the Ecuadorian language "Auca" (now known 
as 'Waorani' or 'Wao'), done by Ken Pike and Rachel Saint in 1962.  Since this 
analysis has been cited elsewhere, it is worth pointing out that Pike and 
Saint relied (out of necessity, at the time) on a young speaker of the 
language, Dayuma, who had fled from her language community as a girl, 
and had been living in a different language community (Quichua) for 
several years. When fluent speakers of Waorani became available several 
years later, it turned out that nasal spreading in the language was more 
pervasive than had been apparent from Dayuma's speech.  (A revised 
analysis of Waorani phonology has never been published, but an accurate 
description is given in the pedagogical grammar Peeke 1979.) In particular, 
one of the examples from Pike and Saint that Ploch relies on here is flawed.  
It purports to show a nasal stop preceding an oral vowel.  But with the 
better data now available, this word turns out to have a nasal vowel 
instead.  Fortunately, it is possible to replace this incorrectly transcribed 
word with correctly transcribed ones that make the same point, so Ploch's 
point here stands.

Ploch's overall argument may not fare as well.  The problem with Ploch's use 
of Waorani to counter-exemplify Kawasaki's claim that a language can "use" 
nasalization on consonants to enhance perception of nasalization on 
vowels, is that in Waorani, obstruents following (not preceding) a nasal 
vowel have precisely that effect.  Specifically, in the environment following a 
nasal vowel, voiceless obstruents are prenasalized, and may become voiced, 
while voiced obstruents become nasal.  Kawasaki's more general point -- 
that nasalization on consonants often gives clues to the nasalization on 
vowels -- still holds, except in the opposite direction: in Waorani, the clues 
are to be found on the consonant following the vowel, rather than the 
consonant preceding the vowel.  This would be an extension of Kawasaki's 
argument, to be sure, but not an implausible one.  At the same time, Ploch 
is correct to point that Kawasaki cannot predict what happens, he can at 
best offer probabilities.

While I am on this topic, I will make a more general point: much current 
work is being devoted to moribund languages, in some cases attempting to 
document languages based on the recollection of elderly speakers who 
have not had the opportunity to talk with other fluent speakers of their 
languages for many years.  This is laudable, but it is incumbent on the 
documenters of such languages curb their enthusiasm and make it clear 
how reliable the data is, lest future generations of linguists be misled into 
making false generalizations.

Another problem with the primary data appears in an argument on page 
95, in which Ploch states that nasalization in Cubeo does not spread 
beyond a single onset-nucleus pair.  This is incorrect; the error is based on 
a misreading of Salser 1971.  Salser, writing in an American structuralist 
phonemic framework, limits his discussion to allophonic rules; he does not 
discuss nasal spreading beyond the syllable, because this would be a 
morphophonemic process in Cubeo.  Nasal spreading across morpheme 
boundaries in Cubeo in fact functions much the same as the nasal 
spreading in Tuyuca described above (for more detail, see Morse and 
Maxwell 1999).

I now turn to the three articles that discuss voicing. Mirjam Ernestus 
discusses syllable-final and word-final devoicing of obstruents in Dutch, 
and the devoicing of fricatives following obstruents.  While obstruent 
devoicing seems to feed fricative devoicing, Ernestus shows that final 
devoicing exhibits the properties typical of phonetic processes (such as 
variability and gradient effects), whereas fricative devoicing exhibits the 
properties of phonological processes -- an apparently impossible situation 
in which a phonetic process feeds a phonological one.  This apparent 
contradiction is resolved by assuming that coda obstruents come to lack a 
value for the phonological feature 'voiced' at the phonological level, so that 
their actual voicing is free to be determined by the phonetic component.  In 
effect, this makes voice a ternary-valued feature: plus, minus, or unmarked.  
Moreover, it requires two markedness constraints on the voicing feature in 
obstruents: one to the effect that "no obstruent has a [voice]-feature", 
deriving the lack of a feature value for voicing, and a second (higher 
ordered) constraint saying that "an obstruent in a cluster is not voiced."

Caroline Féry examines obstruent devoicing in German.  The descriptive 
generalization is that while obstruents contrast for voice in syllable-initial 
position, they are voiceless in word-final position, and most -- but not all --
 are voiceless in syllable-final position.  Two general sorts of explanations 
have been proposed: either voicing is licensed in syllable onsets, or it is 
forbidden in syllable codas.

One might hope that the issue could be resolved by looking at ambisyllabic 
stops, which are presumably both syllable- initial and syllable-final.  
(Ambisyllabicity is of course controversial; Féry argues briefly for it on the 
basis of the distribution of stressed lax vowels, which do not appear in 
German in unambiguously open syllables.  Some unfortunate typos in her 
example (10a) mar the presentation, if not the actual argument.) But as it 
turns out, German behaves inconsistently: native words have only voiceless 
ambisyllabic obstruents, while some loanwords have voiced stops in that 
position.  This contrast would be consistent with a two-level stratification of 
the German lexicon, something that has been proposed in the past; but 
Féry argues that there are further idiosyncrasies of the lexicon which 
demand a hierarchical stratification into multiple levels.  Féry develops an 
Optimality Theory (OT) analysis of the facts, although it is not clear that an 
OT analysis would have any advantage over a traditional rule- based 
analysis.

There are apparently very few voicing alternations which hinge on 
alternations in ambisyllabicity; Féry mentions one, an alternation between 
two forms of a 'strong' verb: schneiden ~ geschnitten.  But the vowel 
changes of German strong verbs render them essentially irregular, meaning 
that the allomorphs must be stored in the lexicon.  So it is unclear whether 
the voicing alternation in this case needs to be accounted for as a 
synchronic phonological process. Moreover, it is not obvious that the 
intervocalic obstruent in schneiden is not ambisyllabic.  There is no hard 
evidence, since the preceding tense vowel need not appear in a closed 
syllable; but neither is there any evidence that the obstruent is not 
ambisyllabic.  The conclusion that the voicing alternation is driven by an 
alternation in whether the obstruent is in a coda is therefore doubly weak.

Apart from these few putative alternations, then, it could plausibly be 
argued that there is no evidence from alternations for an active process of 
devoicing ambisyllabic obstruents.  Under a derivational theory of 
phonology, German speakers might simply have chosen underlying forms 
which reflect the surface voicing of those obstruents.

Féry addresses a similar issue in a footnote concerning word-initial [ts] vs. 
[s] (the latter occurs in loanwords, but not in native vocabulary), but argues 
that because speakers will have heard both pronunciations of loanwords, 
they must allow for both inputs, and their grammar must choose the correct 
output.  While this argument goes through for OT (assuming "richness of 
the base"), it does not go through for traditional phonological theories, 
where speakers are free to choose an appropriate underlying form for their 
particular idiolect.

In summary, for the native speaker, the division of German words into two 
sets, one with and one without voiced ambisyllabic obstruents, might simply 
be a random division, no more interesting than the division of non-native 
words into those which happen to have or not have voiced ambisyllabic 
obstruents, or for that matter the set of words which have or do not have 
the phoneme /m/.  Without knowing what else follows from the division, it 
is impossible to tell.

K.G.  Vijayakrishnan assumes that asymmetries in the typology of 
phonological processes -- in this case processes of weakening in Tamil -- 
are to be accounted for by universal conditions on constraint ordering.  
While I suspect that the explanation for such asymmetries is to be found 
elsewhere (in the phonetic processes which are the diachronic sources of 
phonological processes), explanations based on universal orderings are 
common in much recent OT work.  At any rate, the interest in this paper 
may lie in the different approach to the same problem as that discussed by 
Féry, namely the problem of phonological strata.  Rather than assuming 
different constraint hierarchy orderings, Vijayakrishnan suggests that the 
underlying representations are different: older words in the history of the 
language, which are more prone to weakening, are underlyingly unspecified 
for the variable features, and therefore more subject to markedness 
constraints, while prespecification blocks such weakening in newer words.  
While this runs contrary to most work in OT, with its assumption of 
the "Richness of the Base", it is nevertheless an interesting proposal, 
potentially tying together issues of irregular forms with research into 
the "emergence of the unmarked".

Eon-Suk Ko's study concerns the effect of the phonation type of a prevocalic 
consonant on the F0 of the following vowel in Korean, which has a three-
way contrast, traditionally referred to as lenis-aspirate-fortis (the precise 
meaning of these terms has been debated).  Previous studies have shown 
that the F0 is higher after aspirate and tense consonants than after lenis 
consonants; it had been suggested that this high tone had been 
phonologized in Korean to a high tone, on the grounds that the rise in F0 
observed in Korean was substantially greater than the analogous change in 
English or French.  Ko argues that the change is merely allophonic.  She has 
several arguments, which I will not attempt to describe, but which seem 
convincing.

Markus Hiller discusses a phonetically small, but nevertheless phonemic, 
contrast in Swabian German between two diphthongs.  At first glance (and 
based on instrumental analysis), the difference appears to be a minute 
timing difference.  But if the phonology needs access to such low-level 
phonetic detail, it brings into question the phonology-phonetics 
distinction.  Hiller considers several ways the contrast might instead be 
represented, ultimately opting for treating the diphthongs as complex units 
consisting of a consonantal part and a vocalic part (with low vowels 
counting as consonantal in some diphthongs).

Philipp Strazny investigates why a set of consonants in Zulu causes lowering 
of a following high or low tone.  The set of tone-depressing consonants 
does not form a natural class under traditional feature systems.  (The 
presentation is confused by the inconsistent use of orthographic forms and 
IPA transcription.  Another source of confusion is what appears at first 
glance to be labels on a scale of F0 values at the bottom of a sound 
spectrogram on page 224; the labels turn out to be measurements of F0 at 
certain points along a time axis whose tick marks correspond to unlabeled 
time intervals.)

The solution Strazny proposes is the creation of another segmental 
phonological feature (or actually, a pair of features, the second feature 
being motivated by an analogous phenomenon in another language).  This 
feature is based on the articulatory gesture of vocal cord tensing; the more 
traditional 'H' and 'L' features are then viewed as abstract features: cover 
terms for a set of gestural features, one or more of which an individual 
language may use to produce certain tones.  The fact that certain Zulu 
consonants cause tone lowering then arises out of an interaction between 
gestural features, some of which are carried by the consonants in question, 
while others serve as the realization of the abstract features of tone.  As a 
welcome side-effect, this explanation accounts for the fact that tone 
depression is strictly local (adjacent to the consonant that causes it), while 
high tones themselves may float some distance away from their source.

Strazny's proposal is related to the idea that a feature like voice may be 
differently implemented in different languages.  Furthermore, it is a small 
step from here to the notion that the cover terms, such as 'H' or 'L', or 
even 'voice', are language-particular, rather than universal.

Finally, Onno Crasborn and Els van der Kooij argue that the configuration of 
the base joints of the fingers (the joints closest to the hand) are never 
phonologically significant in the Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT).  
(Poor quality in reproduction has resulted in the crucial labels in one 
photograph being virtually impossible to read, and the contrast is marginal 
in some of the other pictures.) While there are obvious differences in the 
flexure at the base joints among signs, Crasborn and van der Kooij present 
convincing reasons to think that most of the differences are free or 
conditioned variation.  (They do not use the term "allophonic", nor do they 
state the conditioning in terms of rules or constraints, but that seems to be 
what they mean.) A small set of words whose base joint configuration 
cannot be accounted for in these terms is said to be iconic (similar to 
onomatopoeia in spoken languages).

Crasborn and van der Kooij briefly consider a few other sign languages, 
which seem to be like NGT in not using the base joint flexure contrastively.  
The authors predict that this is likely a universal of signed languages, 
presumably because it is innate.  Of course, the discovery that some 
language did use the basal joints contrastively would not undermine 
Crasborn and van der Kooij's claim for NGT, only the universal claim.  At any 
rate, I am skeptical that feature systems for signed languages (or spoken 
languages, for that matter) are either universal or innate. Nevertheless, 
following up on this study in other signed languages would be a fascinating 
project.

There is a web page:
http://site.ebrary.com/pub/benjamins/Doc?isbn=1588113515
where one can read it, and for a nominal price copy or print pages.  However,
the special browser software runs only under Netscape Communicator 4 and
Internet Explorer, under Microsoft Windows.

REFERENCES

Barnes, Janet. 1996. Autosegments with three-way contrasts in Tuyuca. 
International Journal of American Linguistics 62:31-58.

Kaye, Jonathan, Lowenstamm, Jean, and Vergnaud, Jean-Roger. 1985. The 
Internal Structure of Phonological Elements: A Theory of Charm and 
Government. Phonology Yearbook 2:305-328.

Morse, Nancy L., and Maxwell, Michael B. 1999. Cubeo Grammar: Studies in 
the Languages of Colombia, 5. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Peeke, M.Catherine. 1979. El idioma huao: Gramática pedagógica, tomo 1: 
Cuadernos Etnolingüísticos, 3.Quito: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Salser, J. K. 1971. Cubeo Phonemics. Linguistics 75:74-79. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mike Maxwell works on morphological processing and language resource 
collection at the Linguistic Data Consortium. He has also studied indigenous 
languages of Ecuador and Colombia, under SIL.





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