Jeroen van de Weijer

Voicing in Japanese

This book presents a number of studies which focus on the [voice] grammar of Japanese, paying particular attention to historical background, dialectal diversity, phonetic experiment, and phonological analysis. Both voicing processes in consonants (such as Sequential Voicing, or Rendaku) and vowels (such as vowel devoicing) are examined. A number of new analyses are presented, focusing on well-known data that have been controversial in phonological debate in the past, but also presenting new (or rediscovered) data, partly through the work of Japanese scholars that hitherto went mostly unnoticed, partly through new database research, and partly through phonetic experiment.

Continuancy in liquids and in obstruents

This paper discusses the contrast between the prototypical liquids, a lateral and a rhotic. There is good evidence that this contrast is one of continuancy: the lateral often behaves like a non-continuant in natural processes (patterning with oral stops and nasals), and the rhotic behaves like a continuant (patterning with fricatives). This leads one to expect that in languages where the lateral and the rhotic are allophones of the same phoneme the distribution of the two might well be decided on the basis of the continuancy values of neighbouring obstruents. However, an examination of a number of languages where laterals and rhotics are allophones shows that the continuancy value of neighbouring obstruents typically plays no such role at all. To resolve this apparent paradox, it is proposed that the continuancy contrast between liquids exists at a different autosegmental level from that between obstruents, so that while natural classes such as the ones mentioned above are expected to play a role in phonology, the two kinds of continuancy specifications cannot affect each other directly, such as by autosegmental spreading.

Basque affricates and the Manner-Place dependency

Abstract In this paper an attempt is made to refine the representation of Basque affricates, taking into account recent research that has shown that the Manner features in these segments are best analysed as two independent unary features [stop] and [cont] (Hualde 1988, Lombardi 1990). All processes bearing on the structure of affricates discussed in Hualde (1991) are reanalysed to argue for a model of the affricate in which only one of these two features, namely [cont], dominates the place of articulation features. Other representational issues discussed are the question whether affricates have one or two root nodes, and whether intermediate nodes like Place and Supralaryngeal are necessary within the affricate structure. The answers suggested will be one and no, respectively.

On the formal description of metathesis: a case study of v-metathesis in Modern Georgian

The formalization of metathesis has long been a problem for phonological theories: specific analyses have typically been subject to the criticism that while being descriptively adequate, they could not explain the process, let alone address the question of what types of metathesis are possible, and what types are not. In this paper we explore previous approaches to metathesis, as in SPE and autosegmental phonology, and argue that Optimality Theory is a better candidate to account for processes of this type, on the basis of a fully productive metathesis process found in Modern Georgian.