Joaquim Brandão de Carvalho

Lenition and fortition

The book is a collection of articles which aims at providing an overall treatment of the question of Lenition/Fortition in its many aspects: historical, typological, synchronic, diachronic, empirical and theoretical. Various current approaches to phonology are represented. The first part of the book is intended to provide stable and, if possible, pre-theoretical criteria that allow to characterize phenomena which count as Lenition/Fortition, and to work out the properties of the phenomena under study. The second part of the book deals with Lenition in selected language families. The third and final part provides formal accounts of Lenition/Fortition.

Formally–grounded phonology: From constraint–based theories to theory–based constraints

It is argued here that most phonological theory is not theoretical, but based on primitives and axioms (the so–called ‘constraints’) which derive directly from the data they are supposed to explain. This article attempts to show what a non–circular conception of phonological theory may look like. The number of segmental primes, their markedness value, phonological content, and combinatory properties, as well as currently assumed constraints on syllable structure are shown to follow from a Boolean algebra, and, thus, to be independently motivated theory–grounded theorems. Hence, for example, neither the ONSET nor the NO–CODA constraints posited by OT are required. Another issue of the present theory is that segmental content and syllable structure and interdependent aspects, which emerge from the determination of skeletal units.

Building on old foundations : From phonemic theory to C/V-segregation

This paper aims at showing that the scope of structural phonemics transcends the limits of the ‘foundations of phonology’, contrary to what is tacitly assumed and appears from some textbooks. It will be argued that the classical concept phoneme, defi ned as a set of distinctive features, presents both obsolete and still relevant properties. One of these properties, linearity, should clearly be abandoned, as follows from acoustic-perceptual evidence as well as from some types of sound change. Thereby, the phoneme in its purest sense can be said to have been superseded by one major trend characterizing post-SPE phonological theory: multilinearity. However, a phoneme-based property of distinctive features, their locality, is still valid, and is empirically supported by cross-linguistic variation. Now, locality and non-linearity are apparently contradictory. It will be shown that this contradiction cannot be resolved, and that both feature properties cannot be captured, unless consonants and vowels are assumed to be universally segregated within phonological representations. This issue leads to several predictions on C/C and V/V interactions, converges with independent processual evidence like vowel-to-vowel assimilation, and addresses the question of the relationship between phonology and morphology.

Deriving sonority from the structure, not the other way round: A Strict CV approach to consonant clusters

Abstract This paper aims to show that sonority-based generalizations on consonant phonotactics should directly follow from representations, not from stipulations on representations such as the commonly accepted licensing or government statements. The basic reason for this is that the second approach is both arbitrary and circular, as it entails a variable ranking of alleged well-formedness principles, if we want to explain, for example, why TR clusters are either tautosyllabic or heterosyllabic depending on the language. I argue instead for a representational alternative assuming that (i) consonants and vowels are universally segregated, and (ii) involve two parallel CVCV sequences – one on the C-plane, the other on the V-plane – (iii) which may differ in length. It is shown how the major sonority categories, and thereby the phonotactic constraints based on these categories, naturally result from how the two CVCV sequences are synchronized if the one on the C-plane is longer than the one on the V-plane. It will also be seen how the proposed structures naturally account for several processes such as liquid metathesis and deletion, vowel epenthesis, plosive fricativization, etc., while providing a means for measuring the relative likelihood of some of them on the basis of representational markedness.