Juliette Blevins

A theoretical synopsis of evolutionary phonology

Abstract 1. An overview of Evolutionary Phonology 1.1. Explaining sound patterns Phonology is the study of sound patterns of the worlds languages. In all spoken languages, we find sound patterns characterizing the composition of words and phrases. These patterns include overall properties of contrastive sound inventories (e.g. vowel inventories, consonant inventories, tone inventories), as well as patterns determining the distribution of sounds or contrastive features of sounds (stress, tone, length, voicing, place of articulation, etc.), and their variable realization in different contexts (alternations). A speakers implicit knowledge of these patterns is often evident in their extension to novel items and in experiments probing phonological well-formedness. This implicit knowledge – its content, formalization, and representation, – is the central focus of modern theoretical phonology, including generative phonology and many of its derivatives (natural phonology, government phonology, dependency phonology, optimality theory).

A Tonal Analysis of Lithuanian Nominal Accent.

In this paper, the A. presents a tonal analysis of inflection, derivation, and compounding for Standard Lithuanian nominals. She argues that nominal accents in this language surface as a result of rules of high tone insertion and high tone deletion, and that accented morphemes are represented with underlying high tones linked to the appropriate moras

New Perspectives on English Sound Patterns “Natural” and “Unnatural” in Evolutionary Phonology

Principles of Evolutionary Phonology are applied to a selection of sound changes and stable sound patterns in varieties of English. These are divided into two types: natural phonetically motivated internal changes and all others, which are classified as unnatural. While natural phonetically motivated sound change may be inhibited by external forces, certain phonotactic patterns show notable stability in English and are only eliminated under particular types of contact with languages lacking the same patterns. Within the evolutionary model, this stability is expected since natural sound changes involving wholesale elimination of these patterns are not known.

Duality of patterning: Absolute universal or statistical tendency?

Abstract As more of the worlds languages are described and compared, more absolute universals have joined the class of statistical tendencies. However, few have questioned the universality of the duality of patterning. Following Hockett, most linguists assume that in all human languages, discrete meaningless parts combine to form meaningful units that, themselves, recombine. However, an alternative interpretation, explored in this article, is that duality, like other proposed linguistic universals, is a statistical tendency reflecting a complex set of factors, and most centrally, the need for some minimal number of basic units that can recombine to yield a potentially infinite set of form-meaning correspondences. If this is the essence of duality, then we expect: languages where duality is not a central component of grammar; languages where most, but not all, utterances are decomposable into meaningless phonological units; and different types of phonological building blocks in different languages. These expectations appear to be confirmed by natural language data.

Another Universal Bites the Dust: Northwest Mekeo Lacks Coronal Phonemes

On the basis of cross-linguistic comparison, many universals have been proposed concerning the structure of phonological inventories. One universal of this kind states that every phonological system has coronal phonemes. In this study, Northwest Mekeo, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, is shown to be a counterexample. Northwest Mekeo lacks coronal phonemes, though surface coronals are found as predictable allophones of velar phonemes, and in some recent loans.

Untangling Leti Infixation

Leti(nese) is an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Leti, just east of Timor. Descriptions of Leti include Jonker (1932) and van Engelenhoven (1995a, 1996). In this paper, I focus on Leti infixation, a little-studied aspect of Leti morphology. In Leti, infixation yields nouns from verb roots. There are eight distinct phonological forms of the nominalizing affix: the three infixes -ni-, -n-, -i- ; the three prefixes ni-, i-, nia- ; the parafix i- + -i- ; and a zero allomorph. Leti nominalizing infixation poses two serious problems of analysis. The first challenge is to properly predict the distribution and shape of the eight allomorphs. A second problem is accounting for the fact that some of the sound patterns that result from infixation are exactly the opposite of those predicted by Optimality approaches like those of Prince and Smolensky (1993). In this paper I demonstrate how the eight allomorphs of the nominalizing affix can be derived from two basic allomorphs via phonological rules, with allomorph selection related to verb class. There appears to be no phonological motivation for the treatment of /ni-/ as a prefix that has been shifted to infixal position due to dominant phonological constraints. The positioning of /-ni-/ must be morphologically specified, either in terms of an infixation rule or some constraint-based equivalent

Nhanta historical phonology

Abstract Nhanta is an Aboriginal language of Western Australia which has received little study and is currently on the verge of extinction. Nhanta is unique among the Kartu languages in displaying evidence of initial consonant loss, sonorant fortition (of laterals and rhotics), a length contrast in obstruents, and a distinctive glottal stop. In this paper, we propose sound changes which have given rise to these unique features, based on the comparative method and internal reconstruction, and discuss their implications for phonological theory within the Australian historical context.

Trimoraic Feet in Gilbertese

In this paper we present evidence for ternary metrical constituents in Gilbertese (Kiribati), a Micronesian language. The terminal elements of stress feet in Gilbertese are moras, not syllables. Further, the typical foot in Gilbertese contains three moras. These trimoraic constituents are units of stress in Gilbertese, and also define minimal prosodic word size, where possible. Ternary metrical constituents of the sort found in Gilbertese are quite rare cross-linguistically, and as far as we know, Gilbertese is the only language in the world reported to have a ternary constraint on prosodic word size. We present a constraint-based analysis of Gilbertese prosody that also makes use of a language-specific template-mapping algorithm

Typological implications of Kalam predictable vowels

Kalam is a Trans New Guinea language of Papua New Guinea. Kalam has two distinct vowel types: full vowels /a e o/, which are of relatively long duration and stressed, and reduced central vowels, which are shorter and often unstressed, and occur predictably within word-internal consonant clusters and in monoconsonantal utterances. The predictable nature of the reduced vowels has led earlier researchers, e.g. Biggs (1963) and Pawley (1966), to suggest that they are a non-phonemic ‘ consonant release ’ feature, leading to lexical representations with long consonant strings and vowelless words. Here we compare Kalam to other languages with similar sound patterns and assess the implications for phonological theory in the context of Hall’s (2006) typology of inserted vowels. We suggest that future work on predictable vowels should explore the extent to which clusters of properties are explained by evolutionary pathways.

Klamath Sibilant Degemination: Implications of a Recent Sound Change

This paper documents a recent sound change in Klamath of *ss > s which took place sometime between the late 1800s and the mid 1900s. A phonetic basis for this sound change is proposed, based on the intrinsic duration of short sibilants. This sound change not only explains the absence of geminate sibilants in modern Klamath but also the lack of derived distributive forms which, historically, differed only from nondistributives in the presence of a geminate sibilant.