Douglas Pulleyblank

Tone in lexical phonology

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1983.

Kinande vowel harmony: domains, grounded conditions and one-sided alignment*

The canonical image of vowel harmony is of a particular feature distributed throughout a word, leading to symmetric constraints like A GREE or S PREAD . Examination of the distribution of tongue-root advancement in Kinande demonstrates that harmonic feature distribution is asymmetric. The data argue that a formal (yet asymmetric) constraint (like A LIGN ) is exactly half right: such a constraint correctly characterises the left edge of the harmonic domain. By contrast, the right edge is necessarily characterised by phonetically grounded restrictions on feature co-occurrence. Of further interest is the role of morphological domains: the interaction between domain restrictions on specific constraints and unrestricted constraints suggests a formal means of characterising the overwhelming similarity between constraint hierarchies at different morphological levels while at the same time characterising the distinctions between levels.

Underspecification, the feature hierarchy and Tiv vowels

The major issue with regard to underspecification theory is whether all types of redundant information should be excluded from underlying representations, or if not, then what the principles are that determine the inclusion or exclusion of particular types of information. The vowel system of Tiv, a Niger-Congo language of Nigeria, is particularly interesting in this regard since the representation of individual vowels in verbal roots requires a type of radical underspecification: no features are actually assigned to vowels underlyingly; surface forms result from the interaction of morpheme-level specifications with rules of spreading and redundancy.

Yoruba Vowel Elision: Minimality Effects

In this paper, we examine vowelelision in Yoruba and show, based on data not previouslydiscussed in the literature, that elisionis driven by prosodic requirements. In particular, wepropose that foot binarity and prosodic wordminimality shield vowels of minimally sizedwords from deletion. On the other hand, whena subminimal word is joined to a form whichobeys minimality, its prosodic well-formednessis improved via deletion. Failure of deletionleads to a fatal violation of foot binarityand minimality. Our analysis is then compared with twoexisting proposals, syllable-based andsyntax-induced analyses.

A note on tonal markedness in Yoruba

It is well established that the tonal system of Yoruba involves the asymmetric marking or retention of certain tones and the absence or loss of others. The behaviour of Yorubas three tones is scalar but non-linear, with H tones being the most stable and M tones being the most unstable. In this note, it is shown that previous accounts of the asymmetries in terms of underspecification are problematic, arguing instead for the incorporation of tonal markedness directly into the formulation of faithfulness constraints.

Vowel deletion in Yoruba

There has been considerable discussion in the Yoruba literature of a rule (or rules) whereby one vowel is deleted when adjacent to a second vowel. Within words, deletion can be triggered by affixation ( s in (la, b)); at the phrase level, deletion can take place in contexts such s between a verb and its object (Ic, d), between a preposition and its object (le), between the focus marker ni and a following subject clitic (If), and between the conjunction ti and the following conjunct (lg):

Low vowels and transparency in Kinande vowel harmony

Transparency—in which a harmony effect passes over a segment without affecting it phonetically or phonologically—has been a controversial concept in previous literature on harmony systems. A typical case of so‐called transparency involves cross‐height vowel harmony in Kinande, a Bantu language (J.40). Previous accounts have analyzed low vowels in this system as being transparent to harmony [Schlindwein, NELS 17, 551–567 (1987)]. Further, some analysts have considered low vowels theoretically incapable of undergoing tongue root harmony. These claims were tested in a single‐subject field study using ultrasound imaging to measure tongue root position in low vowels. Results indicate that (a) advanced versus retracted tongue root position (ATR) is a viable feature for describing the phonological distinction in the vowel system; (b) there is a phonetic difference between low vowels when adjacent to ATR triggering vowels; (c) this distinction in low vowels does not decrease with distance from trigger vowels, sug...

Greater than noise: frequency effects in Bantu height harmony

A major concern of phonological theory is how complex phonological patterns can be acquired simply through exposure to imperfect language data. Central to this topic is the nature of the cognitive apparatus brought to bear on this problem of acquisition. The “nativist” extreme in this regard is to postulate a highly articulated Universal Grammar (UG), with a rich set of structures that are specific to language, hard-wired into the language-learning infant. The “nurture” extreme is to assume that there is very little cognitive infrastructure that is specific to language. Instead, general purpose learning mechanisms are applied to language data, resulting in an Emergent Grammar (EG) that develops from exposure to the patterns of an adult grammar. These two proposals make different predictions about the nature of sound patterns. In this study, our basic question is whether the distribution of sounds within languages with vowel harmony exhibits the patterns predicted by UG or those predicted by EG. To do so, we explore the frequency of words that violate height harmony rules, and as we will see, in several languages they are less frequent than would be expected by chance, but more frequent than would be expected on the basis of a categorical phonological rule, i.e., the robustness of the patterns is greater than the noise in the data, but less than exceptionless.

Glottalization and Lenition in Nuu-chah-nulth

This article examines glottalization and lenition in Nuu-chah-nulth. These processes involve features introduced via affixation, features that are sometimes compatible with the final segment of the stem and sometimes incompatible. An understanding of the intricacies of these patterns requires a focus on featural representations, with lexical representations involving floating features and variable specifications for features. Both of these properties follow from the postulation of a rich base, with features freely combining in inputs. The analysis argues for covert features, for constraints holding more strongly in small domains than large domains, and for the importance of a markedness scale on glottalizability.

Phonology without universal grammar

The question of identifying the properties of language that are specific human linguistic abilities, i.e., Universal Grammar, lies at the center of linguistic research. This paper argues for a largely Emergent Grammar in phonology, taking as the starting point that memory, categorization, attention to frequency, and the creation of symbolic systems are all nonlinguistic characteristics of the human mind. The articulation patterns of American English rhotics illustrate categorization and systems; the distribution of vowels in Bantu vowel harmony uses frequencies of particular sequences to argue against Universal Grammar and in favor of Emergent Grammar; prefix allomorphy in Esimbi illustrates the Emergent symbolic system integrating phonological and morphological generalizations. The Esimbi case has been treated as an example of phonological opacity in a Universal Grammar account; the Emergent analysis resolves the pattern without opacity concerns.