Abstract
The aim of this article is to show that synchronic cognitive constraints are responsible for some restrictions on human speech sound patterns; not all markedness asymmetries can be ascribed to Performance-based mechanisms of diachronic change. We identify evidence for synchronic constraints in sound patterns that are desirable from a Performance perspective yet are not attested. We also discuss recent experiments that provide evidence for psychologically and even neurophysiologically active restrictions; these patterns can be distinguished from statistical generalizations across the lexicon. We also argue that there is evidence that language learning and adult well-formedness judgments are determined by innate predispositions. Finally, we examine the methodology behind choosing a synchronic or diachronic account for a particular sound pattern when both potentially offer an explanation.
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Notes
Examples that do not count as ‘neutralization’ here are those involving contextual assimilation or dissimilation. For example, Bradley (2006) reports that the Anʔdiʔêm dialect of Katu allows only dorsals before coronal laterals (e.g., [klâm] ‘urinate’, [gluh] ‘go out’) while the Phúhòa dialect has coronals in these locations (cf. [tlâm], [tluh]); Mong Njua is cited as having free variation between dorsals and coronals in this environment (e.g., [khla]∼[thla] ‘to run; jump’) (also see Rice 1996 and de Lacy 2006a:370 for a similar case in South Vietnamese). These are cases where the OCP bans adjacent identical place specifications; the influence of context puts them outside of the scope of ‘neutralization’ as used here.
We use de Lacy’s theory of markedness constraints here for convenience. The same point can be made with equal force using a Fixed Ranking theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004) or using constraints that relate structural complexity to markedness. All of these theories are able to produce systems in which [k] cannot be epenthetic.
To guarantee that /p/ will not neutralize to [k], restrictions on other markedness constraints are necessary (specifically that there is no markedness constraint that favors [k] over [t]). To ensure that /p/ maps to [t] and not to some other element (e.g., [f]), certain rankings of faithfulness constraints are also necessary. The role of faithfulness constraints in determining the output of neutralization is discussed in de Lacy (2006a:253ff, 783ff).
The motivations for [t] epenthesis and [k]/glottal epenthesis must be different. We suggested that the benefit in [t] epenthesis is that it minimizes vocalic overlap by having a consonant that is coarticulated least with the surrounding vowels; the motivation therefore means that the learner’s desire to make the vowels as perceptually separate as possible overrides the desire to accurately reproduce the perceived speech signal. In glottal and potentially [k] epenthesis, the opposite holds. Glottals (particularly [h]) are significantly affected by their environment, and so is [k], but do not alter its acoustics. So, an epenthetic glottal or [k] would separate vowels perceptually, yet allow minimal deviation from the perceived speech signal by allowing the vowel articulations to continue through them.
For the idea that the learner favors alternants that differ minimally in their perceptual properties, see Steriade (2001).
Christófaro-Silva (2003) shows that [k] replaces [t] in [tl] clusters in on-going sound changes in Brazilian Portuguese, e.g., atleta ‘athlete’ can be pronounced [akleta]. She argues that this and other changes in tautosyllabic clusters are motivated by a Performance factor, namely, the greater token frequency of [kl] over [tl].
The [spread glottis] specification of the /h/ survives as aspiration on a following stop.
A possibly more likely but uninteresting alternative to this development is that all [a]s become schwa, except those that are stressed. This alternative is uninteresting because the typical phonetic correlates of stress, greater duration and intensity, should prevent the shortening and quieting that would lead to a stressed [a] losing its sonority and becoming schwa.
For the conditions surrounding passive formation in Māori and evidence for epenthesis, see de Lacy (2003), which builds on a great deal of previous work cited therein.
All daughters of PCE contrast three places of articulation for stops; the most common are [p t k]. PCE most likely had epenthesis because the suffix can be reconstructed back to Proto-Polynesian, and epenthesis in the passive and gerund is found in languages outside PCE.
Our thanks to ‘Oiwi Parker-Jones for his help with Hawai’ian. As in Māori, underlying final consonants surface: /malah-ia/→[malahia] ‘ache’, /paul-ia/→[paulia] ‘finish’, /inum-ia/→[inumia] ‘drink’. When /ia/ can be incorporated into the same PrWd (i.e., with short bases), the [i] deletes post-vocalically: /ale-ia/→[aléa] ‘swallow’ (Elbert and Pukui 2001:84). Bases that end in /a/ and long bases force the passive into its own PrWd, so epenthesis occurs: /wela-ia/→[{wéla}{ʔía}] ‘burn’, /aloha-ia/→[{alóha}{ʔía}] ‘love’.
Doing so would amount to taking up the notoriously difficult task of proving a negative. Instead, what we do here is demonstrate that many putative cases of dorsal epenthesis fail to meet the criteria for counting as epenthetic. These criteria are neither complex nor controversial, but rather surprisingly they have been ignored by those who have argued that dorsals are epenthetic just so long as they happen to occur in contexts that resemble those where genuine epenthetic segments do.
A (C)V reduplicant with a habitual/distributive meaning can prefix to these morphemes with unsurprising results: /\(\mbox{\textsc {red}}_{\upsigma}\)-Cμ-q-fætæn/ → [fæ-fμ-fætæn] ‘walk habitually’; /\(\mbox{\textsc {red}}_{\upsigma}\)-Cμ-q-aːtɨ/ → [a-kμ-k-aːtɨ] ‘smoke habitually’. (The reduplicant can only copy root material, thus *[ka-kμ-k-aːtɨ].) Because geminate glides are not allowed, the prefixes infix after a glide: /\(\mbox{\textsc {red}}_{\upsigma}\)-Cμ-q-won/ → [w-o-kμ-k-on], *[owμ-won]. This reduplicant can appear with the causative, with expected results: /\(\mbox{\textsc {red}}_{\upsigma}\)-Cμ-q-a-eːw-in/ → [æ-kμ-k-æ-j-eːw-in] ‘first ones, the first’. See Goodenough and Sugita (1980:Sect. 4.3) for further discussion.
In all the Basque cases, the apparent epenthesis was influenced by its environment: [b] only appears between /u+a/ sequences in four of the dialects, while [ʒ] appears between /i+a/, and there is no epenthetic consonant for the other hiatus situations (/a+a/, /e+a/, /o+a/).
Howe (2004) also argues against a placeless/glottal ‘ŋ’ analysis for the Chukchi nasal. In Chukchi, only /ŋ/ undergoes assimilation; /n/ and /m/ do not. Trigo (1988) argues that this type of selective assimilation can only be explained if the ‘ŋ’ is actually placeless. However, de Lacy (2002, 2006a) and Howe (2004) provide evidence that Chukchi ‘ŋ’ is truly dorsal. This interpretation is beside the point, however, as de Lacy (2002, 2006a) also shows that segments need not be placeless in order to undergo assimilation, and in fact any single place of articulation can assimilate in place while the others do not.
The only other approximately relevant case is neutralization of codas to uvular [χ] before obstruents in Surinam Carib (e.g., /enaːpɨ/→[enaːχ-potɨ] ‘eat repeatedly’; Gildea 1995). It is unclear how relevant this process is to the issue at hand as uvulars may be a variant of gutturals, which can be grouped with glottals as a particular class of segments (McCarthy 1994). For further discussion, see de Lacy (2006a:134–135).
The account of Athabaskan tonogenesis presented here condenses and updates the one presented in far more detail in Kingston (2005); that account supersedes the one first presented in Kingston (1985). All these attempts to explain how tone developed in this family rely on the prior work of Krauss (1978, published in 2005) and Leer (1979, 1999, 2001).
This contrast has also been lost in stem-final stops in a few peripheral Alaskan languages without being replaced by a tone contrast.
The purpose of *0/_
is the same as one that prohibits a vowel from occurring without nasalization following a nasal or nasalized segment in a language with nasal harmony such as Madurese (McCarthy and Prince 1999). The complementary constraint, *T/_X, mimics one banning nasalization following an oral segment.Moreton did not find that nuclear F1 and F2 differed significantly before [t] compared to [d] for the other three diphthongs /eɪ, ɔɪ, aʊ/.
Some English-speaking communities do not pronounce /aɪ/ in noticeably different ways before obstruents differing in voicing (see Moreton and Thomas 2007 for a list); they have chosen to exaggerate neither the hypo- nor the hyper-articulation.
Hallé et al. (1998) show that French listeners find it difficult to distinguish [d, t] from [g, k] before [l], and Hallé et al. (2003) and Hallé and Best (2007) show that Hebrew listeners, whose language permits [dl] and [tl] in onsets, are much better at this discrimination than French or English listeners. This difference shows that the constraint against onset [dl, tl] is low-ranked relative to the constraint preserving the contrast between coronals and dorsals in Hebrew but high-ranked in English and French.
This generalization is supported by the fact that loanwords with [bw, pw] exist in some English dialects e.g., in Bu enos Aires and Pu erto Rico, but no dialect has loanwords with initial [dl, tl].
The difference in English listeners’ responses to [dl] versus [bw] onsets in Moreton’s (2002) results shows that the mere presence of a gap is not sufficient to learn that a string is prohibited, but we will set aside this difficulty for Evolutionary Phonology in the remainder of this discussion.
This ERP’s timing, polarity, and cortical topography closely resembles the mismatch negativity (MMN) obtained whenever the brain detects that the current stimulus is auditorily different from the immediately preceding one.
The terms for the statuses, ‘legal’, ‘absent’, and ‘illegal’, only describe the primes in the test pairs, as all the primes are legal for the other two types of pairs, identity and control pairs. These terms are nonetheless applied to pairs of these two types to make explicit which test pair each corresponds to.
The identity trials are the same for legal and absent pairs because /gwa/ was the target for both the legal prime /dwa/ and the absent prime /bwa/.
The need for gaps in that evidence to be interpreted as evidence of prohibitions against the missing structure has already been discussed in the preceding section.
Only the results from the youngest two age groups, 4.5 and 10 months, are discussed here, because only they are directly relevant to the question of whether markedness constraints outrank faithfulness constraints in the initial state.
Both studies also examined Russian speakers’ responses in the various experiments. Their responses will not be discussed here because Russian permits clusters of all these types.
They would fail to discriminate the CCVC from the CəCVC strings when presented visually if they encoded them phonologically by converting the graphemes to phonemes.
There is perhaps no small risk of vicious circularity here, as the sound sequences an English speaker observes in that language are themselves likely to be governed by universal sonority sequencing constraints. The simulation presented here avoids that circularity only to the extent that it does not overtly try to use such constraints.
After presenting our argument, we respond to Daland et al.’s (2011) case for the inductive alternative; specifically that the participants’ responses in Berent et al.’s (2007, 2009) syllable-counting experiments can be ‘projected’ from the statistical properties of clusters in the English lexicon. Our argument was developed independently of theirs, at the same time as their paper became available.
The Learner generates weights for each constraint; these were not used in the next step of the simulation because the strings they were next applied to are unattested in English, and were therefore likely to demand different constraint weights.
Although English-speaking participants did not respond ‘two syllables’ to every disyllabic stimulus and the frequency of that response varied as a function of the sonority of the flanking consonants, they still responded ‘two syllables’ to all disyllabic stimuli on nearly 90 % of trials or better. Because accuracy was so high overall on these trials and the range of variation as a function of the flanking consonants sonority is so slight, we made no attempt to model these responses.
These values were determined by eye from Fig. 1 in Berent et al. (2007) and from Fig. 2 in Berent et al. (2009). For all sonority rises but /ml, nw/ they were 63±5 %; for /ml, nw/ they were 90±3 %; for sonority plateaus, they were 28±5 %; for all sonority falls but /md, nb/, they were 14±5 %; and for /md, nb/, they were 71 ±3 %. (The exceptional onsets in each case are from Berent et al. 2009, all the others are from Berent et al. 2007.) These estimates are accurate to roughly 1 %. The confidence intervals are confidence intervals for differences between means, which are \(\sqrt{2}\) greater than the confidence intervals of the means themselves. The standard deviations of the normal distributions thus equal \((\mbox{confidence interval}\allowbreak * \sqrt{n})/(\sqrt{2} * 1.96)\), where n is the number of participants in each experiment (16 for the syllable-counting experiment reported by Berent et al. 2007 and 26 for the one reported by Berent et al. 2009). Because the values are percentages, they were limited to the range 0–100.
Before doing so, it’s vital to establish that these predictors are not collinear. Values of κ for the CCC and CeC predictors and the predictors for Profile, Difference, and Values range from 6.2–8.7, which are just above the value, 6, below which there is no appreciable collinearity (values close to 15 would indicate modest collinearity). These predictors may therefore be combined safely. The predictors in the Profile, Difference, and Values models are of course highly collinear, so they cannot be combined with one another.
These clusters were [pw, zr, mr, tl, dn, km, fn, ml, nl, dg, pk, lm, ln, rl, lt, rn, rd, rg]; the italicized ones were included in our modeling, too.
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Acknowledgements
We are particularly indebted to Elliott Moreton, six anonymous reviewers, and the associate editor for their many comments. We also wish to thank the following people: John McCarthy, Joe Pater, Kevin Mullin, Alexei Nazarov, Brian Smith, Presley Pizzo, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Robert Staubs, Haruka Fukazawa, Mafuyu Kitahara, Nina Topintzi, Clint Hartzell, Lisa Sanders, Minta Elsman, Wendell Kimper, Yelena Fainleib, Michael Key, Karen Jesney, Ellen Broselow, ‘Oiwi Parker Jones and Stephen Marlett. We remain responsible for any errors.
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de Lacy, P., Kingston, J. Synchronic explanation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 287–355 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9191-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9191-y