Common Phonological processes - There are several kinds of familiar processes that are found in many many languages.

Transcription

1 Common Phonological processes - There are several kinds of familiar processes that are found in many many languages.

2 1. Uncommon processes DO exist. Of course, through the vagaries of history languages can develop highly ideosyncratic patterns. Example: The Indo European RUKI rule: s > S / RUKI. This happens in Indo-Iranian, Slavic, and Baltic. RUKI = /r/, /u/, /k/, and /i/ (not a natural class!)

3 2. Common segmental interactions - Assimilations. Adjacent sounds become more similar to each other. Examples: total assimilation Latin octo > Italian otto 'eight' Old English myln > Modern English mill Carribean Spanish (casual speech process) hasta /asta/ > [ahta] > [atta] 'until' partial assimilation PIE *swep-no > Latin somnus 'sleep' (nasality) Latin lupu > Spanish lobo (voicing) English in-tolerant > intolerant, in-possible > impossible, in-compatible > i[n]compatible English dog[z], rib[z] versus docks and rips. (voice) (place)

4 3. It makes sense to think of this as gestural interaction - o gestures for adjacent segments overlap with each other - nasality overlaps with vowel in camp o effects of gestures blend with each other - tongue position in key vs. coo However, assimilation at a distance is harder to explain this way

5 4. Assimilation at a distance - a challenge to an articulatory view of assimilation. Consonant harmony PIE *pekw > Italic *kwekw 'to cook, ripen' (Latin /kokw-/ coquere 'to cook') Vowel harmony Germanic umlaut /mu:s/ 'mouse' /mu:si/ 'mice' become /mu:s/ /my:s/. With unrounding (y>i) and great vowel shift (u>au and i>ai) we have the modern English pronunciations.

6 5. Common segmental interactions - Dissimilations. Adjacent sounds become more different from each other. Examples: Adjacent sounds may dissimilate: Finnish /kakte-/ > [kahte-na] 'as two' (stop.stop > fric.stop) Greek ptero ~ ftero 'feather' ftinos ~ ftinos ' cheap' Dissimilation at a distance is more common: Latin velal > English velar (note also alveolar, and uvular, but labial, dental, palatal). Grassman's law: Sanskrit bhabhuva > babhuva 'became' (aspiration) Dahl's law: Kikuyu /kikuju/ > /gikuju/ 'Kikuyu' (voicing) K'iche kaq > kjaq 'red' (place)

7 6. The perceptual motivation of dissimilation. Increase the auditory/perceptual contrast among sounds in a sequence (syntagmatic contrast). K'iche [k j ] is less like [q] than is [k], so the fact that the onset and coda have different place of articulation is enhanced by the palatalization. The Greek change pt > ft ft > ft is doubly percepual in nature: (1) dissimilates continuancy, and (2) enhances place cues by having the consonant at the CV boundary be a stop (stop place cues are stronger in CV position than in CC or VC position). - at the cost of increased homonymy!

8 7. Prosodic structure plays a role in phonological processes. Prosodic structure = rhythm, prominence, grouping Rhythm - units of timing syllable timing - each syllable feels equal in rhythmic weight stress timing - each stress foot feels equal in rhythmic weight (syllables within feet alternate in weight) mora timing - each mora feels equal in rhythmic weight (mora is easy to define in Japanese - writing system - less so in other languages). Prominence - emphasize a word in an utterance some combination of pitch pattern (accent) and/or duration Grouping - signal aspects of syntactic or discourse structure pause between syntactic or discourse units slow down between units pitch reset at boundaries (low to high, or high to low)

9 8. Syllable position and articulation of consonants. syllable ( onset, rhyme (nucleus, coda)) -- draw tree structure Nucleus is vocalic usually, or syllabic consonant. Onset and coda are typically made up of consonants. Tendency across languages to have more C contrasts in onset position. Mandarin - only nasals [m], [n], [N] in coda. Korean - 3-way stop series only occurs in onset position.

10 9. The perceptual robustness of onset position. The tendency for languages to permit more contrast in onset position may be driven by perceptual bias - auditory information for place of articulation in stops (particularly) is greater in onset position. Presence of stop release burst and formant transitions. Informational importance of some onsets. left-to-right word recognition process places greater weight on word onsets.

11 10. Foot position and segment realization. In stress-timed languages the stress foot is composed of stong and weak syllables. foot(σs,σw) - trochaic foot foot(σwσs) - iambic foot ex: garden ex: about segments in weak syllables tend to be reduced 11. Some reduction processes. vowel centralization - vowel becomes like schwa emph[æ]tic - e»mph[ ]sis vowel deletion memorize - mem(o)ry

12 12. Why reduction of unstressed syllables? Articulatory weakening - shorter, less energy devoted to the production of unstressed syllables - perceptual reinterpretation of weak syllable. Talker /memori/ Listener /memri/ produced as: recovered as: [mem ri] [mem ri]

13 13. An additonal factor in reduction - frequency of usage. Highly frequent words show a greater number of pronunciation variants in a corpus of conversational English. There were 1516 occurrences of yknow with 232 different pronunciations.