29.3446, Review: Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax; Typology: Samuels (2017)

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Subject: 29.3446, Review: Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax; Typology: Samuels (2017)

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Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2018 09:52:06
From: Michael Cahill [Mike_Cahill at sil.org; mike_cahill at sil.org]
Subject: Beyond Markedness in Formal Phonology

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-5171.html

EDITOR: Bridget D.  Samuels
TITLE: Beyond Markedness in Formal Phonology
SERIES TITLE: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 241
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Michael C. Cahill, SIL International

SUMMARY:

Many phonologists take the concept of “markedness” as self-evident and an
accepted part of phonology. This volume shows that this is far too simple a
view, and that there are a significant number of linguists who reject the
concept as unnecessary as part of formal phonology. There have been various
attempts to define what the characteristics of markedness are (e.g. Steriade
1995, Hume 2003, Rice 2007). These characteristics generally focus on
frequency and structural or phonetic complexity. The Optimality Theory
enterprise, of course, generally divides constraints into Faithfulness and
Markedness (Prince & Smolensky 1993) where Markedness means roughly
“disfavored structure” of some sort. Samuels has done phonologists a favor by
collecting contributions from various scholars who critically examine the
concepts of phonological markedness, and in many cases, conclude by rejecting
the notion. The nine chapters are as follows.

David Odden writes on “Markedness in substance-free and substance-dependent
phonology.” His opening sentence appropriately sets the tone for the book:
“‘Markedness’ has a decent claim to being the most disagreed-on notion in
phonological theory.” Odden observes that markedness has in general been
applied to rules and representations, but also to frequency of occurrence –
and that these are two unrelated domains which resist a unified treatment. He
traces the notions of markedness in detail from Trubetzkoy to Jakobson to
early generative theory and Chomsky and Halle (1968). Their SPE approach to
markedness boils down to computational simplicity: some relationships, whether
segment inventories or rules, are formally simpler than others, and so are
unmarked. Odden points out that in SPE a simpler rule is expected to be more
common; however, this confuses the domains, and the formal theory really makes
no claims on probabilities. For example, changing a plus to a minus in feature
specifications of a rule is formally allowed by the mechanism of SPE, but this
often leads to highly unnatural and unattested rules. 

Turning to more contemporary models like Optimality Theory, Odden asserts that
the concept of markedness is even less coherent than in previous models. OT
constraints are generally of two types: Correspondence and Markedness.
Correspondence constraints deal with relations between two levels, and
Markedness “simply refers to anything that isn’t Correspondence.” So in OT,
markedness has no relationship to previous notions of markedness. Inside and
outside of OT circles, markedness concepts are still being discussed,
especially in questions of asymmetry, underspecification and privativity, in
which the feature that is present is by definition marked; and this may still
be worth exploring.  Odden concludes that phonological patterns which have
been explained on the basis of markedness are also explainable on the basis of
functional causes, possibly phonetically or historically based ones. Since
these are independently needed anyway, it calls into question the need for the
existence of an independent notion of markedness in phonological theory. 

Charles Reiss’ chapter is on “Contrast is irrelevant in phonology: A simple
account of Russian /v/ as /V/” The title of this paper is a bit misleading, as
it depends on a specific definition and domain of contrast. For Reiss,
“phonology” is the phonological computation system, but does not include
segmental inventories, which he relegates to the domain of the “lexicon.” He
writes (p. 26) that “the phonology doesn’t ‘care’ about contrast, because it
has no mechanism to do so.” He notes that a rule of the form s → z / __ d
could be either an allophonic rule or a neutralizing rule, depending on the
underlying consonantal inventory. So the form of the rule does not “care”
about whether there is an underlying contrast between s and z. However, he
does admit that contrast is used as a method to determine different underlying
forms (e.g. maz vs. mas, p. 28). He has argued before that markedness is
incoherent (Hale and Reiss 2008).

Reiss spends the bulk of the chapter in a detailed discussion of Russian. For
final devoicing, he adopts a strategy of first deleting the [+voiced] feature,
and then by separate rule, inserting [-voiced]. He does a similar two-step
process for voicing assimilation before another obstruent. The Russian /v/
acts sometimes as an obstruent and sometimes like a sonorant. Reiss proposes
that /v/ is [-sonorant], but underlyingly unspecified for [voice]. It does
undergo final devoicing by insertion of [-voice], but crucially, does not
trigger voicing assimilation, by having no [+voicing] specification at that
point of the derivation. It does, however, undergo voicing assimilation. All
this follows from underspecification of [voice]. He ends with the statement
that his analysis of Russian lack of contrast “perhaps constitutes an argument
 against markedness as a useful notion.”

Juliette Blevins’ contribution is titled “What are grammars made of?” She
starts by debunking three ideas of phonological universals that have been
proposed for phonological grammars: Distinctive Feature Theory, the sonority
hierarchy, and the prosodic hierarchy. Distinctive features are not seen as
innate and universal, as in SPE (Chomsky & Halle 1968). She gives examples
where Distinctive Feature Theory fails. Features do exist, but can be viewed
as emergent and possibly language-specific, as in Mielke (2008). For the
sonority hierarchy, Blevins demonstrates that different languages do not treat
a segmental sequence the same in terms of sonority, and again suggests that
sonority scales are language-specific and thus learned properties. The
prosodic hierarchy (Phonological Phrase  > Prosodic Word > Foot > Syllable),
with strict layering, has been claimed to be universal and innate, but Blevins
cites cases where the Foot level, for example, can be skipped. Again, her
proposal is that prosodic hierarchy can be language-specific. These proposed
universals are viewed rather as broad and common tendencies.

Turning specifically to markedness, Blevins notes that the phonological
properties of markedness listed, for example, in Haspelmath 2006 do not follow
automatically from the type of markedness constraints common to Optimality
Theory. She examines two specific claims of unmarkedness – that of coronals
and of CV syllables, and cites Northwest Mekeo, which has no coronals, as
counter-evidence to the former claim. She discusses several phonetic qualities
of coronals that would make them extremely common, but points out difficulties
with attempts to incorporate these phonetic explanations into a formal
phonological grammar. The tendency to have elements that are stable and easy
to produce and perceive can also be extended to sign languages. For open
syllables, Blevins cites two languages that require closed syllables
word-finally. The tendency for CV syllables can again be explained in terms of
stability and ease of production and perception, rather than markedness. These
are grammar-external factors, not built into the formal grammar. 

Bert Vaux and Bridget Samuels write on “Consonant epenthesis and markedness.”
This concrete contribution focuses in on one particular phenomenon that
directly relates to markedness: if a consonant is epenthesized in a language,
which one is it, and why? The answers often have been related to the assumed
unmarked status of coronals, or, if available, pharyngeal, especially glottal
stop (e.g. Lombardi 2002). This has been undermined by the study of Hall
(2013) on the rarity or even non-existence of epenthetic [r] outside of
English and Uygur (but see Cahill 2007 for an OT account of both epenthetic
[ʔ] and flap [r] in a single language).Vaux and Samuels discuss the analysis
of r-insertion in English dialects and in Uygur in some detail, concluding
that it is indeed insertion, but not glide insertion (and that English is a
case of hypercorrection of the r-deletion rule). 

They discuss various formal proposals on markedness by Lombardi, de Lacy, and
Steriade, finding both theoretical and empirical defects in them. Crucial for
any views of markedness is the extremely wide variety of consonants that have
actually been found to be epenthetic, including those with velar and labial
places. The proposals examined are all constraint-based systems which thus
include markedness as an inherent part of their theoretical apparatus. Vaux
and Samuels, in light of the seemingly endless variety of epenthetic
consonants, instead propose a rule-based system which is not limited by
putative universal markedness constraints. They conclude with a proposal for
English that includes a rule of r-deletion ordered before a rule of
r-insertion, reflecting the historical hypercorrection that is the source of
the phenomenon. This accords with their view that much of synchronic phonology
is the result of historical processes that are frequent because of the
frequency of their phonetically-motivated sound changes, a la Blevins (2004).

Edoardo Cavirani and Marc van Oostendorp contribute a chapter called “On
silent markedness.” These authors, unlike the previous ones, maintain a type
of markedness as a useful concept, but propose a different domain for it.
Parallel to empty nodes in morphosyntactic theory, they propose empty
positions in phonology, and a markedness hierarchy for these. They begin by
reviewing the case for empty categories in syntax, such as an empty PRO
subject, concentrating on the reasons scholars have proposed empty structures.
They then review the Government Phonology (GP) approach to empty positions.
For example, the Arabic lexeme ktb has empty nuclei that can sometimes be
filled, e.g. ktəb ‘he/she writes.’ (Note: I do object to their labeling the
vowel-less ktb in Arabic a “word”, since it is never pronounced without
vowels.)  The Final Empty Nucleus (FEN) assumption is that there is an (empty)
nucleus after a final consonant cluster. In words like “drink,” the final [k]
is regarded as the onset of a syllable followed by an empty nucleus, and this
empty nucleus explains why clusters like [ŋk] are followed by vowels.
 
Following Turbidity Theory (originally proposed to account for opacity in
Optimality Theory), the authors assume the independent and potentially
asymmetric relations: (a) an element projects to a segment in the lexicon, but
(b) a segment projects to an element in the phonetics. Thus when an element is
inserted, there is a pronunciation relation (b) but no projection relation
(a). This schema enables theoretical differentiation between a purely empty
vowel, a “phonologically contentful silent vowel,” and a pronounced schwa, for
example. They exemplify their approach by examining word-final devoicing in
Dutch and vowel reduction and deletion in Italian. They conclude that some
empty positions are “emptier” than others, that is, there is a markedness
hierarchy present, and suggest future research investigate the relation
between empty content in phonology and in syntax.

Kuniya Nasukawa contributes “The phonetic salience of phonological
head-dependent structure in a modulated-carrier model of speech.” Like
Cavirani and van Oostendorp above, Nasukawa finds a connection between
morphosyntax and phonology in the area of markedness. After reviewing some
common diagnostics for unmarked segments, he notes that in the foot structure
of the word “water,” the first syllable is considered the head, as evidenced
by stress. That is, the perceptually more salient element is the head.
However, in more modern syntactic theory, in syntactic structures like the DP
“the backyard,” the head is the determiner “the” and it is the non-head
“backyard” that is more important than the head in conveying information. And
it is the non-head “backyard” rather than the head “the” that is stressed and
thus more prominent. He contrasts a sonority-driven approach with his
modulated carrier model. In sonority, the loudness or amplitude is paramount,
but in the modulated carrier model, it is the magnitude of modulation that
counts. So in sonority terms, a plosive consonant is not very sonorous, but in
modulated carrier terms, the modulation of the signal is bigger for plosives
than vowels or even other consonants. 
 
This chapter maintains that phonetic prominence of head/dependent structures
functions analogously in both phonology and syntax. He proposes that the
head/dependent role in “water” and such be reversed to match syntactic
properties. Thus the first syllable is the dependent, though information-rich,
and the second syllable, though information-poor, is the head. The size of
modulation is less in the structural head. The mechanism proposed avoids the
issue of markedness altogether, and presumably, though not explicitly stated,
provides another angle on the superfluity of markedness.

Shanti Ulfsbjorninn writes on “Markedness and formalising phonological
representations.” This paper is the only one which goes beyond segments,
dealing with syllables. Ulfsbjorninn acknowledges the criticisms of markedness
made by those in this volume, as well as others such as Haspelmath 2006, but
maintains that markedness, at least “markedness by complexity,” still has
explanatory value, at least for syllable structure. Though markedness is
emergent, it still has its source in the phonological component.
Ulfsbjorninn’s markedness is extragrammatical in that it is not used to
directly compute surface forms, unlike markedness constraints in OT.
 
After a summary of other scholars’ lists of putative functions and properties
of markedness, the author dives into specifics of syllable structure,
specifically, Strict CV theory, in which the fundamental unit of syllables is
CV. Word-final consonants thus end in empty nuclei, and vowel-initial words
begin in empty onsets. (Like Cavirani & van Oostendorp’s paper in this volume,
Strict CV theory has its origin in Government Phonology.) In this approach,
syllable typology can be stated in terms of onset and coda parameters: the
more positive parameter settings, the more marked the syllable. Markedness is
thus described in terms of complexity of description: the more empty
categories, the more marked. He presents an extended example of how this would
apply in the case of consonant clusters, which are traditionally viewed as
marked structures, as evidenced by language acquisition and language
pathology. He details consonant clusters in English in this schema, and
eventually presents a detailed table of eight types of languages ranked in
ascending complexity of CC behavior, from Yoruba (no parameters positive) to
Polish (all 8 parameters positive). He goes through all eight types of
languages in his schema, and concludes that markedness as complexity does have
a formal phonological definition.

Mathias Sharinger contributes “Are there brain bases for phonological
markedness?” This paper goes beyond the usual phonology to explore various
brain imaging methods and the light they may shed on markedness. He
forthrightly says in his first paragraph that “Such results… cannot be taken
as neuroscientific proof for the existence of markedness.” However, his
results show that reducing markedness to pure frequency measures is not
warranted by most of the data, and that markedness is not so easily dispensed
with. 
 
After a review of what various researchers mean by “markedness,” Sharinger
reviews brain imaging methodologies. Functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) can measure blood deoxygenation in very specific spatial areas of the
brain, and this is associated with neural activity. There have been a
multitude of fMRI studies that Sharinger cites that deal with processing
abstract phonological units such as features, phonemes, syllables, and words.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is more temporally-based than fMRI, and measures
electrical activity of the brain. Studies show increased electrical brain
activity when the person is presented with deviant stimuli, as opposed to more
standard ones. 
 
Sharinger examines 1) feature-based representational markedness, relating to
underspecification and markedness (e.g. Steriade 1995), 2) markedness measured
by co-occurrence patterns and violations, and 3) markedness caused by
morphological variations. For the first, EEG measures show an asymmetry when
the order of unspecified/specified stimuli was varied. There was no evidence
for the claim that the less marked segment was more frequent, but an
underspecification account fared better than a pure markedness account. The
other two cases are not examined in as much detail, but illicit co-occurrences
such as word-initial [lb] were marked by decreased brain processing, as does
irregular morphology such as English past tense “keep/kept” which produce
marked phonological structures such as coda clusters. He cautions that more
definite conclusions of future studies must be based on a firm understanding
of phonological markedness, of brain function, and the connection between
these, and we have not reached that point yet. 

Pedro Martins writes the last chapter on “There is no place for markedness in
biologically-informed phonology.”  This briefest paper in the volume, like
some others, begins by citing Haspelmath’s 2006 paper against markedness, and
notes that though it has not been refuted, most phonologists continue to refer
to markedness. Martins asserts that language is a biological system and can be
understood in biological terms. On this basis, he maintains that claims that
markedness is unique to language are not only implausible, but difficult if
not impossible to investigate; there is no link between genes and any
linguistic properties. His view that “markedness” in biological terms may not
be unique to language or indeed, to humans at all, also has drawbacks. In
these expositions, he mostly is speculating rather than adducing concrete
evidence. In response to a reviewer, Martins discusses the syntactic notion of
Merge, which is unexplainable in biological terms, but he takes Merge to be
more established than markedness. 

I interpret his “biological” as to be understood as purely “materialistic:
rather than any non-physical component, though he doesn’t use that specific
term. And he writes (p.225) “In fact, linguistic properties at large, even
those that we can define in a much more satisfactory manner than markedness,
stand in the way of creating linking hypotheses between linguistic behavior
and biology and neuroscience.” The lack of a direct connection between biology
and linguistics is a frustration to him, since he proceeds primarily from a
biological starting point. 

EVALUATION:

The contributions to the volume are generally well-written and clear, though
some terms like “substance-free phonology,” “I-phonology,” and
“extra-descriptive grammars” may not be transparent to those who have not been
engaged with some aspects of current phonological discussions. 

The volume deals only with phonological markedness, where the bulk of
linguistic discussion has centered. There also have been contributions to the
concept of morphological markedness, from Zwicky 1978 to Bale et al 2011 and
Pertsova 2015, and undoubtedly others. It would be interesting to see how the
contributors to this volume deal with markedness in this other linguistic
domain.

Also, all the contributions deal with segmental markedness (though
Ulfsbjorninn includes syllables). Having a contribution that deals
specifically with tone would round out the contributions nicely. For example,
in many Bantu languages, tone is privative, with only High tone being
phonologically active (e.g. Hyman 2001). How does this contribute to the
markedness debate? 

Even in the segmental realm, there is a limited selection of markedness
phenomena examined. Specific topics examined in detail include coronal place
(Blevins, Vaux & Samuels), CV syllables (Blevins), consonant epenthesis (Vaux
& Samuels), devoicing (Cavirani & van Oostendorp), vowel reduction/deletion
(Cavirani & van Oostendorp), and syllables (Ulfsbjorninn). Besides tone, other
phenomena could have been examined in detail, such as vowel qualities (and
inventories), nasality, etc.  Each of these authors rejects a traditional
notion of markedness, based on the particular phenomenon they present. 
Because there are empirical shortcomings to markedness in some areas, and
there are other explanations for at least some putative markedness, then the
conclusion is that markedness does not exist. Of course, since there are
phenomena they do not examine, it is a jump to reject all markedness for all
phenomena. The purpose of the book is not explicitly to disprove markedness,
as some papers do not do that. If such were the case, then a more exhaustive
set of topics would need to be examined.

A question that deserves more discussion is markedness as universal vs.
language-specific markedness. Several authors in the volume discuss other
literature that asserts that markedness can be language-specific, e.g. Hume &
Tserdanelis (2002), Hume (2003), where a labial rather than a coronal is
unmarked. How many of the arguments against markedness here and elsewhere are
in actuality arguments against universal markedness? Tone offers an example:
usually High is marked (by criteria of active spreading, not being default,
etc.) but in Bora and Hausa it is reversed – the Low is the tone with these
behaviors. 

Reiss’ paper only mentions markedness as an afterthought, not directly, and
thus seems a bit out of sync with the main topic of this volume. Martins’
paper is the most general (almost philosophical) and the least evidence-based
paper. 

The volume is well-edited for the most part, with an occasional typo like
“delection” for “deletion” on page 76, and “ffactors” rather than “factors” on
page 229. There is an IPA mistake on page 167, with [sɪkəs] rather than
[sɪkθs]. More serious is that the references in Reiss’ paper to Reiss (2017),
Rice (1993), Samuels (2011), Shapiro (1993), and Wiese (2000) are not
included. It appears that the last page of references was simply omitted.
Also, Advanced Tongue Root for some reason in Reiss’ paper is abbreviated Atr
rather than ATR (p. 29). 
 
The index is nicely done; when I needed to look up several items, they were
there. 

The majority of contributors to this volume (Odden, Reiss, Blevins, Vaux &
Samuels, Martins, perhaps Nasukawa) are convinced that markedness has no place
in formal phonology, and their arguments have merit; the phenomena they deal
with can be explained by historical developments or perceptual and production
factors. But it is often clumsy to refer to these varied factors in write-ups.
So I wonder if phonologists, though aware of this, might keep on referring to
markedness as shorthand for these features. As Samuels 2011:18 (cited in
Martins’ paper) writes, “…when we speak of markedness, we are really using
shorthand for a number of deeper factors that are in large part
extralinguistic.” This shorthand referral system would be analogous to
referring to High tone as H rather than by its tonal features [+upper,
+raised], for example. Thus as much as it may frustrate many of the authors of
this volume, I suspect that the term “markedness” is not going away in the
near future.

REFERENCES

Bale, Alan, Gagnon, Michael & Khanjian, Hrayr. 2011. On the relationship
between morphological and semantic markedness; The case of plural morphology.
Morphology 21: 197–221. 

Blevins, Juliet. 2004. Evolutionary Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Cahill, Michael. 2007. Aspects of the Morphology and Phonology of Konni.
Dallas: SIL International.

Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. New York,
NY: Harper & Row.

Hale, Mark and Charles Reiss. 2008. The Phonological Enterprise. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.

Hall, Tracy Alan. 2013. How common is r-epenthesis? Folia Linguistica
47:55–87.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. Against markedness (and what to replace it with).
Journal of Linguistics 42.1: 25–70. 

Hume, Elizabeth.  2003. Language specific markedness: The case of place of
articulation. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology 9.2: 295–310.

Hume, Elizabeth, and Georgios Tserdanelis. 2002. Labial Unmarkedness in Sri
Lankan Portuguese Creole. Phonology 19.3: 441–58. 

Hyman, Larry M. 2001. Privative Tone in Bantu. In Kaji, Shigeki (ed.),
Crosslinguistic Studies of Tonal Phenomena: Tonogenesis, Japanese Accentology,
and Other Topics. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of
Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, pp. 237–257.

Lombardi, Linda. 2002. Coronal epenthesis and markedness. Phonology 19:
219–252.

Mielke, Jeff. 2008. The emergence of distinctive features. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Pertsova, Katya. 2015. Interaction of morphological and phonological
markedness in Russian genitive plural allomorphy. Morphology 25: 229–266.

Prince, Alan, & Paul Smolensky. 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint
interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of
Colorado, Boulder. (Published 2004, Malden MA: Blackwell.)

Rice, Keren. 2007. Markedness in Phonology. In Paul de Lacy (ed.) The
Cambridge Handbook of Phonology. 79-97, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Samuels, Bridget. 2011. Phonological Architecture: A Biolinguistic
Perspective, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Steriade, Donca. 1995. Underspecification and markedness. In The Handbook of
Phonological Theory, John Goldsmith (ed.) 114-174. Oxford: Blackwell.

Zwicky, Arnold. 1978. On Markedness in Morphology. Die Sprache 24.2: 22–27.
https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/on-markedness.pdf


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mike Cahill did field research in Ghana for several years, and is currently
SIL's Orthography Services Coordinator. He is a phonologist by training and
inclination (Ph.D., Ohio State University), especially focused on tone and
labial-velars. He has recently been concentrating on linguistic and
non-linguistic factors involved in developing orthographies for previously
unwritten languages, and advising on these.





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