APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
21-23 June 2013
Lublin, Poland
BOOK OF ABSTRACTS
APAP 2013
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CONTENTS
I. PLENARY PAPERS
John Coleman – Interface? What interface? Squeezing phonology out of phonetics ............................................ 4
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk – How phonetic is Natural Phonology: past and present. ............................... 4
Haike Jacobs – Perceptual illusion. Perception and production in OT. ................................................................. 5
Tobias Scheer – Spell-out, post-phonological ....................................................................................................... 6
II. SESSION PAPERS
Cormac Anderson – The representation of Insular Celtic fortition: phonetics and phonology between
cognitive and generative linguistics................................................................................................................. 13
Cormac Anderson & Geoff Schwartz – Mutation trajectories and Onset structure in modern Irish ................. 15
Antonio Baroni – Element Theory and the Magic of /s/ ...................................................................................... 15
Antonio Baroni & Marko Simonovic – A Perception-Based Account of Variation: Phonetics, Phonology
and the Invariant .............................................................................................................................................. 16
Katarzyna Bednarska – Breton vocalic quantity in the CVCV phonology framework ..................................... 17
Florian Breit – How many segments? Theories of segmental representation and their generative capacity ....... 18
Agnieszka Bryla-Cruz – The assessment of Polish-accented English by Irish native listeners in the light
of empirical data. ............................................................................................................................................. 19
Anita Buczek-Zawiła – „Are we sane? – or will Welsh consonant mutations give Cognitive Phonologists
a headache?” .................................................................................................................................................... 19
Manni Chu – Articulatory preference vs. perceptual assimilation--4 group comparison .................................... 20
Eugeniusz Cyran – Progressive Voice Assimilation in Polish ............................................................................ 21
Bartłomiej Czaplicki – Type frequency and iconicity: Distribution of Polish diminutive suffixes .................... 22
Bartłomiej Czaplicki, Marzena Żygis & Daniel Pape – Acoustic analysis and sociolinguistic aspects
of recent developments in Polish sibilants....................................................................................................... 23
Iwona Czyżak – Glottalization and the laryngeal node faithfulness in English ................................................... 24
Guillaume Enguehard – Consonantal Alternations and Stress in Southern Saami ............................................. 24
Sasha Euler – Approaches in Pronunciation Teaching: History and Recent Developments ............................... 26
Wiktor Gonet – Phonetic and Phonological Parameters in Individual Speech Characterization......................... 26
Ewa Guz – Phonological indicators of formulaic status: a study of L1 and L2 speech of Polish advanced
learners of English. .......................................................................................................................................... 27
Magdalena Igras & Bartosz Ziółko – The influence of phoneme duration, energy and frequency
features on the prominence of accent and sentence boundaries in spoken Polish ........................................... 28
Krzysztof Jaskuła – Decadence of labials in Polish – phonetics or phonology? ................................................. 28
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
Artur Kijak – Show me what you’re made of: the internal structure of English velars ...................................... 29
Grzegorz Krynicki – Articulatory grounding of phonemic distinctions in English ............................................ 30
Anita Lorenc & Radosław Święciński – Articulatory Studies of the Polish Sound System .............................. 31
Mayuki Matsui – Examining incomplete neutralization in Russian: Evidence from pseudo-nouns ................... 31
Grzegorz Michalski – Formal restrictions on supernumerary consonants at word edges in English .................. 32
Katherine Nelson – Phonetic contribution to phonology in lesser-studied languages: evidence
from Nez Perce ................................................................................................................................................ 33
Katharina Nimz – Predicting vowel length production in a second language – Phonetic versus
phonological contrastive analyses ................................................................................................................... 34
Marta Nowacka – “Flesh and Blood Pronunciation Teacher Goes to the Internet Phonetic Teacher…”:
Review of Internet Phonetic Resources in 2013 .............................................................................................. 35
Ewa Pająk – The issue of Polish voicing – a diachronic perspective .................................................................. 36
Marek Radomski – Adaptation of Polish CC consonant clusters by native speakers of English ........................ 37
Arkadiusz Rojczyk & Andrzej Porzuczek – Acoustic features of nasal geminates in Polish ........................... 38
Mikołaj Rychło – The irrelevance of phonetics: Why Do Poles Fail to Produce Polish Sounds
in Foreign Words? ........................................................................................................................................... 38
Geoff Schwartz & Grzegorz Aperliński – The phonology of CV transitions .................................................... 39
Linda Shockey, Zinny Bond & Małgorzata Ćavar – Can the Presence of Casual Speech Reductions
in L1 Aid Perception of Spoken L2? ............................................................................................................... 40
Piotr Steinbrich – Phonetic accommodation in an EFL classroom setting - the case of NS teachers ................. 40
William J. Sullivan & Sarah Tsiang – Speech Errors and the Architecture of Macrophonology ...................... 41
Nasir Abbas Rizvi Syed & Sultan Melfi Aldaihani – The Emergence of the Unmarked in Loanword
Phonology: Harmonic Serialism Account ....................................................................................................... 42
Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska – Controversies in current English pronunciation pedagogy –
perennial problems, realistic and unrealistic solutions .................................................................................... 43
Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska, Sławomir Stasiak & Radosław Święciński – On the teachability of English
allophonic distinctions to intermediate Polish learners ................................................................................... 44
Radosław Święciński – Phonetic characteristics of the palatal glide in Polish and their phonological
implications. .................................................................................................................................................... 44
Mateusz Urban & Sławomir Zdziebko – The Acoustic Analysis of /l/-Vocalization in Ayrshire
Scottish English ............................................................................................................................................... 45
Olga Valigura – Phonetic Interference as a Sociocultural Phenomenon ............................................................. 46
Magdalena Wrembel – Cross-linguistic influence in second vs. third language acquisition of phonology ........ 46
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INTERFACE? WHAT INTERFACE? SQUEEZING PHONOLOGY OUT OF PHONETICS
John Coleman
University of Oxford
For the past 23 years, the Laboratory Phonology conferences have served as a forum in which a wide
variety of scholars from experimental phonetics to theoretical phonology – linguists, psychologists and
others – have met to discuss, debate and learn from one another. Although Laboratory Phonology is
not a phonological framework (comparable with OT or Government Phonology, etc), we have
explored many different ideas about the relationships between phonology and phonetics. In this talk I
shall examine three main areas:
1) Quantitative/computational modelling. The conventional view of distinct levels of representation
for phonology and phonetics requires also some sort of "interface" mechanism for relating the two
levels. Especially in the 1980s-1990s, a number of Laboratory Phonology papers offered specific
numerical models (typically implemented as computer programs); for example, my own "YorkTalk"
parametric speech synthesis system, Hertz's autosegmentally-inspired "Delta" system, Browman and
Goldstein's "Articulatory Phonology", and Pierrehumbert and Beckman's approach to intonational
modelling, which started out as an approach for generating f0 curves. From this work we learned that
(a) some phonological "rules" can be modelled perfectly well at the phonetic level, and (b) how to deal
with underspecification and variation in phonetics.
2) Neuroanatomical perspectives. During this same period, significant advances have been made in
imaging mental activity, as a consequence of which our understanding of the brain mechanisms of
speaking and hearing has greatly improved. This work has tended to confirm that our long-term
memories of how to say words and what they sound like contain rich phonetic details, rather against
the conventional theoretical arguments that the sound shape of words must surely be rather abstract.
Apparently not, it seems.
3) Exemplar-based approaches, and the question of fine phonetic detail. A growing body of work on
"covert contrast" – fine phonetic distinctions that are maintained in supposed neutralization contexts –
presents a challenge to the idea of discrete, symbolic, phonological categories. Latterly, a number of
laboratory phonologists have embraced or at least are exploring the idea that perhaps there is no
abstract phonology at all (in humans), and that our "phonological" knowledge is built upon massive
storage of richly detailed phonetic memories.
HOW PHONETIC IS NATURAL PHONOLOGY: PAST AND PRESENT.
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
The type of explanation offered by Natural Phonology (NP) had originated in a variety of phonetic and
phonological studies of the 19th and 20th century. The theory itself was founded by David Stampe
(1969, 1973) and expounded by Patricia Donegan and David Stampe (1979). Its basic thesis was that
phonological systems are phonetically motivated. The theory received new impetus and grew into a
large explanatory framework of Natural Linguistics due to the works of Wolfgang U. Dressler
(starting with Dressler 1984) and followers. Modern Natural Phonology (MNP) has a much wider
perspective, reaching far into the areas of external evidence and relying on a solid functional and
semiotic foundation.
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In its early days, Natural Phonology was criticized for its excessive reliance on phonetics (cf.
Anderson 1981, Dinnsen 1978, Dinnsen & Eckmann 1977, 1978, Drachman 1978, 1981, Dressler
1974, Hellberg 1980, Kodzasov & Krivnova 1981, Lass 1980, 1981, all reproached in Dressler 1985).
Statements such as
“[t]he living sound patterns of languages, in their development in each individual as well as in
their evolution over the centuries, are governed by forces implicit in human vocalization and
perception” (Donegan and Stampe 1979: 126)
gave rise to an opinion among phonologists that Natural Phonology was just phonetics, and thus could
not aspire to be a theory of phonology. Phoneticians, on the others hand, would accuse it of pretending
to be phonology and thus not being technical enough, and thus not phonetics, either.
A challenge for Modern Natural Phonology is to resolve the following issue: is it indeed the case that
the more informed phonetics will enable us to find phonetic explanations for all phonological
decisions? Scientific phonetics is undoubtfully a fundamental source of principles governing
production and perception of speech for a natural phonologist. However, it is the role of phonology to
decide what to take from phonetics, i.e. which of the options offered to overcome phonetic difficulties
to adopt for a given language system. Phonetic principles are not enough to be able to account for
phonological structures. They may be motivating or explanatory or executional/implementational
alongside cognitive, psychological, sociological, and other linguistically‐external principles, all of
which together allow for the formulation of universal phonological preferences.
I will talk about the epistemology of Natural Phonology and the role of phonetics in it, palatalization
as a (potential) case for detailed phonetics, and phonotactics of consonant clusters as a (potential) case
for auditory phonetics.
PERCEPTUAL ILLUSION. PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION IN OT.
Haike Jacobs
Radboud University Nijmegen, Holland
Work on loan phonology over the past decade has stressed the importance of perception, more so than
production (Jacobs and Gussenhoven, 2000), in accounting for how loan words are adapted into a
borrowing language (cf. among others, Dupoux e,a, (1999), Boersma and Hamann (2010), Peperkamp
e.a. (2008). Of special interest are the cases of perceptual illusion. Japanese speakers perceive
epenthetic vowels in French loans which French speakers do not. Korean speakers perceive word-final
epenthetic vowels in English loans which are not perceived by English speakers. In this talk, I will
show that perceptual illusion is not limited to loanword phonology, but, in fact, is commonplace in
native phonologies. After that, I will review and discuss two recent models (Calabrese, 2010 and
Boersma and Hamann, 2010) which both offer a full-fledged theory of how perception interacts with
production in phonology. The two models vary in their theoretical orientation (OT Boersma and
Hamann, constraint repairs model Calabrese), but converge on the important role played by perception
in dealing with loanword phonology. I will argue for an OT-based model of perception and production
that allows for a more straightforward account of perceptual illusion effects both in native and in nonnative, loanword phonology.
REFERENCES
Boersma, P. and S. Hamann. 2010. “Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception”
in Calabrese, A. and L. Wetzels (2010) eds. Loan Phonology, 11-58. John Benjamins,
Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
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Calabrese, A. 2010. “Perception, production and acoustic inputs in loanword phonology” in Calabrese,
A. and L. Wetzels (2010) eds. Loan Phonology, 59-114. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Dupoux, E. 1999. “Epenthetic vowels in Japanese: A perceptual illusion?” Journal of experimental
psychology: Human Perception and Performance 25, 1568-1578.
Jacobs, H. and C. Gussenhoven. 2000. “Loan phonology: perception, salience, the lexicon and OT.”
in Dekkers, J. e.a. Optimality Theory: Phonology, syntax, and acquisition, 193-210. Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Peperkamp, S. e.a. 2008. “On the perceptual origin of loanword adaptations: experimental evidence
from Japanese.” Phonology 25, 129-164.
SPELL-OUT, POST-PHONOLOGICAL
Tobias Scheer
Université de Nice, France
In Cognitive Science, modularity holds that the mind (and ultimately the brain) is made of a number of
computational systems that are specialized in a specific task, non-teleological and symbolic (Fodor
1983, Coltheart 1999, Gerrans). Modules are also domain-specific, which means that they work with a
specific symbolic vocabulary that is distinct from the vocabulary of other modules. For example, the
input to visual and auditory computation is made of distinct items, which will be unintelligible by
modules that they do not belong to. Based on their domain-specific input vocabulary, modules perform
a computation whose output is structure. Hence syntactic computation (whose central tool is Merge in
current minimalism) takes as its input features such as gender, number, person, tense etc., and outputs
hierarchized syntactic structure, i.e. trees.
A necessary consequence of domain-specificity is translation (or transduction): since different
modules speak mutually unintelligible idioms, intermodular communication must rely on translation of
items from one vocabulary into another.
Participating in what is called the cognitive revolution of the 50s-60s (Gardner 1985), generative
linguistics applies modularity to language. Language-internal modular structure that is standard since
Chomsky (1965:15ff) is made of three units: one unit where items are concatenated (morpho-syntax)
and two interpretational units that provide a meaning (LF) and a pronunciation (PF) to the output of
the concatenative module. In current minimalism, the way morpho-syntax transmits information to PF
has come to the fore: spell-out, late insertion and linearisation are discussed. Lexical insertion converts
(portions of) the hierarchical morpho-syntactic structure into phonological material. This implies a
lexical access: the phonological material inserted is stored in the lexicon (long-term memory), and the
units stored are morphemes.
The assignment of a morpheme to a portion of the morpho-syntactic structure depends on its morphosyntactic properties, but on account of its phonological characteristics is unpredictable and arbitrary:
there is no reason why, say, -ed realizes past tense in English (rather than -eg or -a). This is because
we are dealing with the lexicon, and lexical properties are arbitrary.
In the talk I explore how these general workings of intermodular communication can be applied to the
other interface that phonology is involved in, i.e. with phonetics. The goal is to construe a consistent
global picture where all interfaces respond to the same logic. Or, in other words, where linguisticinternal matters and competing theories are refereed by extra-linguistic constraints, in our case those
imposed by cognitive science and modularity. This perspective is in line with minimalist and
biolinguistic tenets: grammar-internal properties are shaped and explained by extra-grammatical, more
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
generally cognitive constraints, typically relating to the interface(s) (third factor explanations, see
Chomsky 2005).
The first thing that needs to be settled is the fact that phonology and phonetics are two distinct
computational systems. Otherwise there is no interface in the first place, and hence no point in
applying the workings of the other interface. The question whether phonetics is just low-level
phonology, rather than ontologically distinct, is the subject of a long-standing debate. Coming from
connectionism (Smolensky 1988), OT is genetically endowed with a scrambling tropism that blurs or
does away with modular contours, on both ends of phonology: morphological and phonetic constraints
are typically interspersed with phonological constraints in the same constraint hierarchy, and
characteristics of two domains (phonology-phonetics, phonology-morphology) often co-occur in the
formulation of constraints. The alternative view that upholds a modular distinction between phonology
and phonetics is also represented in the literature, though (see the overview in Kingston 2007). The
talk assumes the latter orientation.
Given thus two distinct modules, phonology and phonetics, which work with distinct vocabulary,
communication can only occur through some kind of translation. Assuming modular standards and
especially what we know from the morpho-syntax-phonology interface, there must be a spell-out
operation that converts the output of phonology into units of the phonetic vocabulary. As was shown,
modular spell-out has a number of properties that then must also apply to its post-phonological
instantiation, and which entail a number of consequences:
1. Lexical access: list-type conversion
a. The match between phonological structure and phonetic exponents thereof is done through a
lexical access. That is, the conversion is list-type, or one-to-one: a phonetic item X is assigned
to a phonological item A.
b. The dictionary-type list in question is hard-wired, i.e. stored in long-term memory and not
subject to any influence from (phonological or any other) computation. It does undergo
diachronic change, though.
2. No computation
a. The difference between list-based and computational conversion is the absence of an inputoutput relationship in the former: the two items of the correspondence are not related by a
computation that transforms one into the other.
b. Nothing is said about the nature and the size of the phonological structure A and its phonetic
exponent X. Namely, there is no segment-based implicit: the phonological units that are
screened by the spell-out mechanism may comprise one or several timing units (x-slots). Basic
autosegmental principles apply: only those melodic items that are associated to timing/syllable
structure are transmitted to the phonetics (i.e. floating melody is not). This property of the spellout mechanism is universal.
3. The match is arbitrary
a. This follows from the fact that translation is list-based: like in a multilingual dictionary, there is
no reason why "table" has the equivalent "stół" in Polish, "Tisch" in German or "udfirk" in some
other language.
b. A consequence of arbitrariness is what Kaye (2005) calls the "epistemological principle of GP":
the only means to determine the phonological identity of an item is to observe its (phonological)
behaviour. Its phonetic properties will not tell us anything. That is, in case spell-out "decides" to
have a given phonological structure pronounced by a rather distant phonetic exponent, its
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phonetic properties may be opposite to its phonological identity and behaviour. For example, if
an /u/ is pronounced [i], it will not palatalise despite its being front phonetically. Relevant
examples are discussed below.
4. Conversion is exceptionless
A basic criterion for classifying alternations as morpho-phonological, allomorphic, phonological,
analogical, lexical or phonetic is the presence of exceptions. The whole notion of exception makes
only sense when both alternants are related by computation: an exception is an exception to an
expected result, i.e. the application of an algorithm that transforms X into Y. If, say, electric and
electricity are two distinct lexical items, it does not make sense to say that antique - antiquity is an
exception to the k - s-ity pattern: there is no such pattern in the first place. Hence talking about
exceptions supposes computation. Since the match of phonological structure and its phonetic
exponent does not involve any computation, it must be exceptionless.
This is indeed what we know from the morpho-syntax - phonology spell-out: there is no variation,
there are no exceptions in the assignment of phonological material to morpho-syntactic structure.
What that means is that among all alternations found in language, only those that are exceptionless can
possibly be due to post-phonological spell-out. The idea that exceptionlessness and "proximity" to
phonetics are strongly related is a long-standing insight: exceptionless alternations are often called
"low level", "surface palatalization" (in Polish) or, quite aptly (for bad reasons though), "late". This
expresses the view that on the route towards phonetics, exceptionless alternations are rather close
towards the phonetic end. However, the literature in question continues to place the processes and
hand in the phonology: "late" means "towards the end of the application of ordered rules" in SPE. In
the present modular approach, "late" means "outside of the phonology": the alternations in question
arise during post-phonological spell-out.
Note that exceptionlessness also played an important role in the division of grammar that was operated
by Natural Generative Phonology (Hooper 1976): only exceptionless alternations could be truly
phonological. Following the structuralist track, alternations riddled with exceptions were rejected into
a distinct computational system, morpho-phonology. Alternations that were called phonological in
NGP, or rather, some of them, are located post-phonologically in the present approach. Only some are
since there is no prohibition for phonological computation to produce fully regular patterns. The only
red line drawn by post-phonological spell-out is that it could not possibly produce alternations that are
not 100% surface-true.
The talk shows that this description fits a number of well-known phenomena in phonology and
phonetics. It puts a cognitive name on what is known in Government Phonology as phonetic
interpretation (Harris & Lindsey 1995: 46ff, Harris 1996, Gussmann 2007: 25ff). It also helps
refereeing competing analyses.
One issue that post-phonological spell-out addresses is the question how much of the alternations that
we observe on the surface is exactly the result of phonological computation. In SPE, the answer was
close to 100% (including "alternations" like eye - ocular or sweet - hedonistic) and since the 70s has
constantly decreased (especially in the Natural Phonologies). Government Phonology is on the far
"small is beautiful" end, i.e. where very little labour is left in the phonology. This perspective is
worked out and theorized by Gussmann (2007), especially for Polish.
Alternatives to phonological computation may or may not be computational in kind. The lexicon falls
into the former category (electric and electricity are two distinct lexical entries), while nonphonological computation includes allomorphy (the root has two allomorphs, electri[k]- and
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
electri[s]-), analogy, and phonetics. Post-phonological spell-out shows that there is life after all
phonological computation is done, and how this life is organized.
Another typical pattern covered by post-phonological spell-out is so-called virtual length. The length
of phonologically long vowels and phonological geminates may be marked in the phonetic signal by
duration, but also by other means: there is no reason why phonological length should always be
signalled by duration. Vowel length has been found to be expressed by ATRness in French (Rizzolo
2002) and vowel reduction in Semitic (Lowenstamm 1991, 2011) and Kabyle Berber (Bendjaballah
2001, Ben Si Saïd 2011). On the consonantal side, phonological geminates may be expressed by the
length of the preceding vowel in German (Caratini 2009), the Cologne dialect of German (Ségéral &
Scheer 2001) and English (Hammond 2007), by the (non-)inhibition of a preceding vowel-zero
alternation in Somali (Barillot & Ségéral 2005), by aspiration in English (Ségéral & Scheer 2008) and
by preaspiration in Icelandic and Andalusian dialects of Spanish (Curculescu 2011).
Another issue is so-called laryngeal realism (Iverson & Salmons 1995, Honeybone 2005, Harris 2009).
It is fairly consensual today that there are two distinct systems of laryngeal, or voice-related
oppositions: what is traditionally called a voice vs. voiceless contrast may in fact involve two distinct
sets of primes, [±voice] or [±spread glottis] in feature-based systems, L- or H-active systems in
monovalent approaches. That is, there are systems (called voicing languages: roughly, Romance and
Slavic fall into this category) where voiced consonants are "truly voiced", i.e. where voicing is the
result of explicit laryngeal action. A prime, [+voice] or L, provides voicing, while voiceless items are
the default: they are produced by the absence of explicit action ([-voice], absence of L). By contrast in
other systems (called aspiration languages: roughly, Germanic languages are a case in point), it is
voiceless consonants that are the result of explicit laryngeal action: a prime, [+spread glottis] or H,
enforces voicelessness. Here voiced consonants are only voiced by default, i.e. because they lack the
prime responsible for voicelessness/aspiration, H (or experience the minus value of [spread glottis]).
In this setup, "by default" means "during phonetic interpretation": obstruents that are phonologically
voiceless, i.e. which lack H (or are specified [-spread glottis]), are pronounced voiced.
The question is how to find out, for any given system, whether voiced consonants are truly voiced, or
only by default. The standard answer in the literature is that this may be decided by looking at the
VOT of word-initial pre-vocalic plosives (e.g. Harris 2009): in voicing languages, "voiced" items are
prevoiced (long lead-time, i.e. negative VOT), while "voiceless items" have a zero or slightly positive
VOT. By contrast in aspiration languages, "voiced" plosives have a zero VOT, while their "voiceless"
counterparts have a strongly positive VOT (long lag-time).
This type of universal phonetic correlate is incompatible with post-phonological spell-out which,
recall, is arbitrary in kind. In recent work, Cyran (2012) has argued that a well-known peculiarity of
voicing in external sandhi that is found in South-West Poland (so-called Cracow voicing) is not the
result of phonological computation. He shows that it may be derived by simply assuming that the
Warsaw-type system is L-based (true voicing), while the Cracow-type system is H-based. When
injected into the same computational system, these opposite representations produce the surface effect
observed.
A consequence of Cyran's analysis is that there cannot be any cross-linguistically stable phonetic
correlate for H- or L-systems. That is, they may not be identified by spectrograms, VOT or any other
property contained in the phonetic signal: Warsaw and Cracow consonants are phonetically identical.
The only way to find out which type of laryngeal opposition a surface voice-voiceless contrast
instantiates is to observe is behaviour. This is what is also predicted by post-phonological spell-out:
phonetic correlates of phonological structure are arbitrary.
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Finally, an issue of interest is the amount of slack that ought to be allowed between the phonological
identity of a segment and its pronunciation. We know that the same phonetic object may have distinct
phonological identities across languages: [ɛ] may be I.A, A.I or I.A (using GP representations where
the head of the expression is underscored). But may it also be I alone, or A alone? Or even U alone?
Intuitively, there must be limitations on how things can be pronounced, since otherwise a three vowel
i-a-u system could in fact be flip-flop where [i] is the pronunciation of A, [a] of U and [u] of I. The
arbitrariness of post-phonological spell-out enforces a counter-intuitive position, though: yes, flip-flop
is indeed a possible situation.
Phenomena like the one that is sociologically affiliated to South-East British posh girls show that this
perspective is on the right track: Uffmann (2010) reports that in the speech of this group, "vowels are
currently shifting quite dramatically, with back/high vowels fronting and unrounding, and a counterclockwise rotation of most of the remainder of the system, leading not only to vowel realisations that
are quite distinct from traditional Received Pronunciation, but also, at least for some speakers, to nearmerger situations (e.g. /i:-u:, ey-ow, e-æ/)" (abstract of Uffmann 2010). Hence the posh girls in
question will pronounce "boot" as [biit].
A better known example that has baffled phonologists for quite some time is the fact that in some
languages the sonorant "r" is pronounced as a uvular fricative [ʁ, χ] or trill [R]. French, German,
Norwegian and Sorbian are cases in point. In these languages, like all other obstruents [ʁ] undergoes
final devoicing (if present in the grammar), and voice assimilation. Phonologically, however, it
"continues" to behave like a sonorant: only sonorants can engage in a branching onset, but the uvular
fricative or trill does so jollily. When looked at through the lens of post-phonological spell-out, there is
nothing wrong with this situation: for some reason the languages in question have decided to
pronounce the phonological item /r/ as a uvular. This does not change anything to its phonological
properties or behaviour.
A final example comes from "exotic" segments such as ingressives or clicks. Surface-bound classical
phonological analysis takes these articulatory artefacts seriously and may implement corresponding
melodic primes (a special feature for clicks for example: [±click]). In the perspective of postphonological spell-out, ingressives and clicks are but funny pronunciations of regular phonological
objects that occur in other languages as well (but of course it must be secured that there are enough
distinct phonological representations for all items that contrast in such a language).
Finally, an obvious fact begs the question: if cases can indeed be found where the phonetic and
phonological identities of an item are (dramatically) distant, it is true nevertheless that in the
overwhelming majority of cases they are not. This is precisely why these few incongruent cases are so
baffling. Probably in something like 97% of all spell-out relations, the way a structure is pronounced is
more or less closely related to its phonological value (i.e. there is little slack). This situation at the
lower end of phonology stands in sharp contrast with the properties of the same spell-out mechanism
at its upper end: the relationship between morpho-syntactic structure and its exponent phonological
material is 100% unrelated. At first sight, this dramatic difference does not speak in favour of the idea
that both translating devices are identical, and that the only difference is the nature of the items
involved.
The key to the problem lies precisely in the kind of vocabulary that is manipulated. Uncontroversially,
the most important ontological gap within subcomponents of grammar is between syntax, morphology
and semantics on one side, and phon- (-ology, -etics) on the other. When items such as gender, tense,
number, case, person, animacy etc. are mapped onto items such as labial, occlusion, palatal etc., the
relationship cannot be anything but 100% arbitrary. It is not even obvious how the degree of kinship
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
between any item of one pool and any item of the other pool could be calculated: any match is as
unmotivated as any other.
By contrast, phonology and phonetics share a number of categories (which does not mean that the
vocabulary items are identical). For example, labiality is certainly relevant on both sides. Therefore the
calculus of a greater or lesser distance between phonological structure and its phonetic exponent is
immediate and quite intuitive.
The reason for this situation is the ontological setup of grammar. Grammar is a cognitive system that
codes real-world properties through a process known as grammaticalization (Anderson 2011). The
real-world properties in question are of two kinds: semantic (eventually pragmatic) and phonetic. The
symbolic vocabulary of morpho-syntax and semantics is the grammaticalized version of real-world
semantic experience such as time, speakers, the difference between living and non-living items,
between humans and non-humans, etc. On the other hand, phonetic categories are grammaticalized in
terms of phonological vocabulary. It is therefore obvious and unsurprising that the output of the
grammaticalization process that turns phonetic into phonological items is akin to the phonetic input,
and also uses the same broad categories. This is also the reason why the default of the relationship
between a phonological category and its phonetic exponent is complete identity: this is what
grammaticalization produces.
Labov (1994, 2001) describes in great detail how grammaticalization of phonetic material proceeds:
inherent phonetic variation that is present in the signal (i.e. which is produced by computation of the
phonetic module) is arbitrarily selected for grammatical knighting in the interest of social
differentiation that fosters group identity. Hence a village, or a group adhering to some urban culture,
or any other socially defined community, seeks to be different and marks that difference with whatever
variation that is offered by the signal. It does not matter in which way they are different (by a
spirantisation, a palatalization etc.), it only matters that they are.
When alternation patterns are born, i.e. when a phonetic variation is knighted by grammar and comes
to stand under grammatical control, they are thus 100% regular, and follow a clear causal pattern. That
is, k
tʃ / i is a possible product of grammaticali ation, but k
tʃ / __u is not. Since grammar is
independent from the real world, though (this is what the Saussurean opposition Langue vs. Parole is
about), rules that were phonetically plausible at birth may undergo modifications in further evolution
of the language, and after some time look quite outlandish, or even crazy. This is the insight
formulated by Bach & Harms (1972): there are crazy rules, yes, but they are not born crazy – they
have become crazy while aging. For example, a context-free change that turns all i's of a language into
u's may transform our phonetically transparent rule k
tʃ / i into the cra y rule k
tʃ / __u. Hence
it takes some historical accident and telescoping in order to produce a crazy rule (posh girls most
certainly produce some).
To come back to post-phonological spell-out, it takes this kind of historical accident and telescoping in
order to produce the distance between a phonological item and its phonetic realization that baffles
phonologists. Mapping relations between phonology and phonetics are not born crazy – they may
become crazy through aging. Most of them do not, though, and this is the reason why the
overwhelming majority of mapping relations show little slack.
REFERENCES
Anderson, John 2011. The Substance of Language. Vol.1 The Domain of Syntax. Vol.2 Morphology,
Paradigms, and Periphrases. Vol.3 Phonology-Syntax Analogies. Oxford: OUP.
Bach, Emmon & R. T. Harms 1972. How do languages get crazy rules? Linguistic change and
generative theory, edited by Robert Stockwell & Ronald Macaulay, 1-21. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
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Barillot, Xavier & Philippe Ségéral 2005. On phonological Processes in the '3rd' conjugation in
Somali. Folia Orientalia 41: 115-131.
Ben Si Saïd, Samir 2011. Interaction between structure and melody: the case of Kabyle nouns. On
Words and Sounds, edited by Kamila Dębowska-Ko łowska & Katar yna D iubalska-Kołac yk,
37-48. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Bendjaballah, Sabrina 2001. The negative preterite in Kabyle Berber. Folia Linguistica 34: 185-223.
Caratini, Emilie 2009. Vocalic and consonantal quantity in German: synchronic and diachronic
perspectives. Ph.D dissertation, Nice University and Leipzig University.
Chomsky, Noam 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam 2005. Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 1-22.
Coltheart, Max 1999. Modularity and cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3: 115-120.
Curculescu, Elena 2011. Preaspiration in Spanish: the case of Andalusian dialects. Paper presented at
the 19th Mancheser Phonology Meeting, Manchester 19-21 May.
Cyran, Eugeniusz 2012. Cracow sandhi voicing is neither phonological nor phonetic. It is both
phonological and phonetic. Sound, Structure and Sense. Studies in Memory of Edmund Gussmann,
edited by Eugeniusz Cyran, Bogdan Szymanek & Henryk Kardela, 153-184. Lublin: Wydawnictwo
KUL.
Fodor, Jerry 1983. The modularity of the mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT-Bradford.
Gardner, Howard 1985. The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. New York:
Basic Books.
Gerrans, Philip 2002. Modularity reconsidered. Language and Communication 22: 259-268.
Gussmann, Edmund 2007. The Phonology of Polish. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hammond, Michael 2007. Vowel Quantity and Syllabification in English. Language 73: 1-17.
Harris, John 1996. Phonological output is redundancy-free and fully interpretable. Current trends in
Phonology. Models and Methods, edited by Jacques Durand & Bernard Laks, 305-332. Salford,
Manchester: ESRI.
Harris, John 2009. Why final obstruent devoicing is weakening. Strength Relations in Phonology,
edited by Kuniya Nasukawa & Phillip Backley, 9-46. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Harris, John & Geoff Lindsey 1995. The elements of phonological representation. Frontiers of
Phonology, edited by Jacques Durand & Francis Katamba, 34-79. Harlow, Essex: Longman. WEB.
Honeybone, Patrick 2005. Diachronic evidence in segmental phonology: the case of laryngeal
specifications. The internal organization of phonological segments, edited by Marc van Oostendorp
& Jeroen van de Weijer, 319-354. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Hooper, Joan 1976. An Introduction to Natural Generative Phonology. New York: Academic Press.
Iverson, Gregory & Joseph Salmons 1995. Aspiration and laryngeal representation in Germanic.
Phonology Yearbook 12: 369-396.
Kaye, Jonathan 2005. "GP, I'll have to put your flat feet on the ground". Organizing Grammar. Studies
in Honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, edited by Hans Broekhuis, Norbert Corver, Riny Huybregts,
Ursula Kleinhenz & Jan Koster, 283-288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kingston, John 2007. The phonetics-phonology interface. The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology,
edited by Paul De Lacy, 435-456. Cambridge: CUP.
Labov, William 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 1, Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William 2001. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 2, Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
Lowenstamm, Jean 1991. Vocalic length and centralization in two branches of Semitic (Ethiopic and
Arabic). Semitic Studies in Honor of Wolf Leslau on the occasion of his 85th birthday, edited by
A.S. Kaye, 949-965. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. WEB.
Lowenstamm, Jean 2011. The Phonological Pattern of phi-features in the Perfective Paradigm of
Moroccan Arabic. Brill’s Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 3: 140-201.
Rizzolo, Olivier 2002. Du leurre phonétique des voyelles moyennes en français et du divorce entre
Licenciement et Licenciement pour gouverner. Ph.D dissertation, Université de Nice. WEB.
Ségéral, Philippe & Tobias Scheer 2001. Abstractness in phonology: the case of virtual geminates.
Constraints and Preferences, edited by Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołac yk, 311-337. Berlin & New
York: Mouton de Gruyter. WEB.
Ségéral, Philippe & Tobias Scheer 2008. The Coda Mirror, stress and positional parameters. Lenition
and Fortition, edited by Joaquim Brandão de Carvalho, Tobias Scheer & Philippe Ségéral, 483-518.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. WEB.
Smolensky, Paul 1988. On the proper treatment of connectionism. Brain and Behavioural Sciences 11:
1-74.
Uffmann, Christian 2010. The Non-Trivialness of Segmental Representations. Paper presented at
OCP-7, Nice 28-30 January.
THE REPRESENTATION OF INSULAR CELTIC FORTITION: PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY BETWEEN
COGNITIVE AND GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS
Cormac Anderson
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Modern approaches to phonology within the theoretical tradition of Government Phonology (GP:
Kaye, Lowenstamm and Vergnaud 1985; Kaye 1989; Harris and Lindsey 1995; 1996; Cyran 2010)
consider phonological representations to be acoustic templates that serve as models for both
articulation and audition (Cyran 2002, 16ff). This view of representation is often seen as a return to the
tradition of Jakobson (Jakobson, Fant and Halle 1952; Jakobson and Halle 1956; Harris and Lindsey
1995, 50; Backley 2009) although the neutrality between production and perception is broadly in line
within the generativist tradition of studying the speech of the 'speaker-hearer' (Chomsky and Halle
1968; Backley 2009).
This paper examines a range of data from Old Irish and Middle Welsh which create difficulties for
contemporary models of phonological representation. These data include two fortitionary phenomena:
in Old Irish /θθ/ = [t] etc. and Middle Welsh /dd/ = [t] etc. These phenomena create problems for
phonological theories which make a priori assumptions about phonological representation on the basis
of either articulatory or acoustic facts. To deal with these data an account based on equipollent
articulatory features has to rely on 'feature flip-flopping' whereby e.g. a double [+continuant] segment
becomes a [-continuant] one, while an account based on monovalent, acoustically-based elements,
such as GP, has to conjure up a 'blue-sky' element, such as |ʔ|. In order to resolve these problems, it is
argued that it is necessary to base phonological representations on phonological and morphonological
patterning in the language, recognising that different languages may encode the same contrasts in
different ways.
With this in view an original phonological is proposed, grounded in a phenomenological
understanding of language (Husserl 1931; Merleau-Ponty 1945; Fraser 1996; 1997) and drawing on
both gestalt psychology (Bühler 1934) and Cognitive Linguistics (Johnson 1987; Langacker 1987;
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Bybee 2001; Nesset 2008) as well as structuralist (Sapir 1925; 1933; Swadesh 1934) and GP (Harris
and Lindsey 1995; Cyran 2011) approaches to phonological structure. It is argued that phonological
representations are best understood as schemata that emerge from the embodied nature of human
cognition. In this view, acoustic cues are the intentional objects of phonological noesis, but there is no
universal mapping of acoustic phenomena to perceptual schemata, allowing different languages to
encode the same contrasts in different ways. It is argued that such a model can deal with the data at
hand in a principled manner and is capable of falsification through experimental study.
REFERENCES
Backley, Phillip (2011). An introduction to element theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bühler, Karl (1934). Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: G. Fischer.
Bybee, Joan (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam and Halle, Morris (1968). The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper and
Row.
Cyran, Eugeniusz (2002). Complexity Scales and Licensing Strength in Phonology. Lublin:
Widawnictwo KUL.
Durand, Jacques and Katamba, Francis eds. (1995). Frontiers of phonology: atoms, structures,
derivations. Harlow, Essex: Longman.
Fraser, Helen (1996). 'An introduction to phenomenological phonology' in McCormack and Russels
eds., 163-8.
Fraser, Helen (1997). 'Phonology without tiers: why the phonological representation is not derived
from the phonetic representation' in Language Sciences 19:2, 101-37.
Harris, John and Lindsey, Geoff (1995). 'The elements of phonological representation' in Durand and
Katamba eds., 24-79.
Husserl, Edmund (1931). Cartesian Meditations. English translation by Cairns, Dorion (1960). The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Jakobson, Roman; Fant, Gunnar and Halle, Morris (1952). Preliminaries to speech analysis: the
distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.
Jakobson, Roman and Halle, Morris (1956). Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton.
Johnson, Mark (1987). The Body in the Mind. The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Kaye, Jonathon (1989). Phonology: a cognitive view. London: Routledge.
Kaye, Jonathon, Lowenstamm, Jean and Vergnaud, J-R (1985). 'The internal structure of phonological
elements: a theory of charm and government” Phonology Yearbook 2, 305–28.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume I, Theoretical
Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
McCormack, Paul and Russell, Alison eds. (1996). Proceedings of the Sixth Australian International
Conference on Speech Science and Technology. Canberra: Australian Speech Science and
Technology Association.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.
Nesset, Tore (2008). Abstract phonology in a concrete model. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sapir, Edward (1925). 'Speech patterns in Language' in Language 1, 37-51.
Sapir, Edward (1933). 'La réalité psychologique des phonèmes' in Journal de Psychologie normale et
pathologique 30, 247–265.
Swadesh, Morris (1934). 'The phonemic principle' in Language 10:2, 117-129.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
MUTATION TRAJECTORIES AND ONSET STRUCTURE IN MODERN IRISH
Cormac Anderson & Geoff Schwartz
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Consonant mutations in Irish have been problematic for theories of phonological representation. The
difficulty lies in providing a unified description of the various phonetic phenomena involved in the
different mutation trajectories. For example the process known as lenition entails spirantization of
stops, yet accounts appealing to [continuant] specification (e.g. Massam 1983; Ní Chiosáin 1991) or or
loss of an element (Cyran 1997; Bloch-Rozmej 1998) cannot explain the behavior of fricatives and
sonorants. Similar problems occur with eclipsis, under which aspirated stops surface as unaspirated
ones and unaspirated stops as the corresponding nasals, e.g. casúr 'hammer', a gcasúr 'their hammer';
gasúr 'boy', a ngasúr 'their boy'. Melodic analyses require reference to two specifications, {H} /{L} or
[voice]/[nasal], yet eclipsis is assumed to be a single process.
A unified description of both lenition and eclipsis is possible within the Onset Prominence
representational environment (OP; e.g. Schwartz 2013). OP builds on recent insights into the structural
nature of segmental representation (e.g. Steriade 1993, Pöchtrager 2006) to offer a new perspective on
both segmental representations and prosodic constituency. Segments emerge from a hierarchical
structure of phonetic events associated with a stop-vowel sequence. Crucially, manner of articulation
is represented not in terms of melodic specification, but rather as levels in the OP hierarchy. From this
perspective, lenition and eclipsis are unified as structural changes. Lenition is the loss of the top-level
Closure node. Eclipsis is the loss of a middle-level Noise node.
Our explanation of the Irish mutation trajectories is facilitated by the following claim. Fortisness in
Irish is represented as a doubled or geminated structural node (Anderson, in preparation). This claim is
compatible with phonetic considerations, since fortis segments are longer in duration than lenis ones.
Moreover, prosodic consequences of laryngeal specifications have been shown for a number of other
languages (see e.g. Pöchtrager 2006, Topint i 2010).
ELEMENT THEORY AND THE MAGIC OF /s/
Antonio Baroni
Universita degli Studi di Padova, Italy
In recent times, many scholars have resorted to phonetics to explain phonotactic patterns. In particular,
the behavior of stridents (especially of /s/) has always been an issue for phonologists since, in
languages that allow complex onsets and codas, stridents appear as an exception to the sonority
hierarchy. For example, in Italian, /s/ can be a simple onset (as in /sano/ 'healthy'), the first element of
a complex cluster (as in /sparo/ 'shot', /strano/ 'strange'), the second element of a complex cluster (as in
/psicologo/ 'psychologist'), a simple coda (as in /pasta/ 'dough', /autobus/ 'bus'). /s/ is the only
consonant to enjoy such a freedom. Traditional phonological analyses have described /s/ in initial
/s/+C sequences as extrasyllabic but such an explanation is clearly unsatisfactory. Henke, Kaisse &
Wright (2012) claim that the special behavior of /s/ has a phonetic basis. Among obstruents, stops rely
on an adjacent sonorant in order to make their release audible, whereas fricatives have richer internal
cues for their identification. Among fricatives, /s/ displays more energy at higher frequencies and is
therefore more acoustically salient than non-strident fricatives such as /θ, f, ɸ/. However, I argue that a
phonetic explanation cannot be a phonological explanation as well. The special status of stridents have
to be explained with theory-internal devices. For my analysis, I draw from Element Theory,
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specifically, from the versions proposed by Scheer (2004) and Backley (2011). For reasons of space, I
will limit my attention to Italian. I will consider the following melodic elements: A, I, U, and the
following manner elements: ?, h, H, L. In my view, A and ? are opposite forces. Segments that contain
A 'want' to be pronounced, whereas those that contain ? tend towards silence. The manner element h,
noise, is an antagonist of ? as well, but is weaker than A and needs melodic support. /s/, /l/ and /r/ have
the same melodic structure: A– I, a fact that translates phonetically in acoustic salience. But /s/, unlike
liquids, receives further support by h, which makes it even stronger. I intend to show that Element
Theory is able to explain, (1) the phonotactic behavior of /s/, (2) why it is different from that of other
obstruents, (3) why it is different from that of liquids and (4) why /s/ is the only obstruent to undergo
voice assimilation and intervocalic voicing in Italian.
REFERENCES
Backley, P., 2011. An Introduction to Element Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Henke, E., Kaisse, E. M. & Wright, R. 2012. Is the Sonority Sequencing Principle an epiphenomenon?
In Parker, S. (ed.) The Sonority Controversy. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 65-100.
Scheer, T. 2004. A Lateral Theory of Phonology. What is CVCV, and why should it be? Berlin: De
Gruyter.
A PERCEPTION-BASED ACCOUNT OF VARIATION
PHONETICS, PHONOLOGY AND THE INVARIANT
Antonio Baroni* and Marko Simonović**
*Universita degli Studi di Padova, Italy **Utrecht University, Holland
How far can one go with reduction? And how does the perception of acoustically reduced forms affect
production, if at all? It is commonly assumed that the main drive in casual speech is articulatory ease
(Ernestus 2000) but how to explain forms like [snstr] for Italian /sinistra/ 'left', [dʃpɾzaɾ] for
Portuguese /dɨʃpɾɨzaɾ/ 'to despise', French [ʃsɛpɑ] for /ʒənəsɛpɑ/ 'I don't know'? These allegro forms
don't seem easier to articulate than their lento counterparts. Importantly, contrary to popular belief,
child--‐oriented speech is not exempt from reduction and coarticulation phenomena. We therefore
assume that the child is exposed, during the same period, both to careful and casual speech forms and
is able to find the invariant, i.e., the phonetic essence that characterizes the word and is present even in
extremely reduced forms. The invariant normally consists of articulatory prosodies (see Kohler 1999),
namely, phonetic features that can characterize the word as a whole or just a part of it, such as
labiality, palatality, nasality, rhoticity, etc. Moreover, acoustically salient segments, such as /s/, are
normally part of the invariant as well. Of course, eventually, the leaner reconstructs an underlying
form from which the careful speech form is derived, but the segments and features that belong to the
invariant have now a special status, they are strong in the representation. For example, the invariant
of Italian sinistra might be something like /s N s R/, where N = nasality and R = rhoticity. All the
pronunciation variants of sinistra contain at least these elements, cf. [snsr], [sinisra], [sĩistra], [sɲistr],
[sinistɝ], etc. In production, the limit to reduction is set by the strong status of these elements in the
underlying representation (e.g., /s/ is relatively hard to articulate, but the speaker knows that she has to
be faithful to the invariant and that /s/ must be pronounced, whereas vowels or /t/ may or may not).
We will analyze other Italian examples in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky
1993), assuming that differences between careful and casual speech can be accounted for by demoting
Faithfulness below Markedness (van Oostendorp 1998, Castella & Simonovic 2012). However,
Faithfulness constraints protecting the invariant cannot be demoted and are always high in the
hierarchy.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
REFERENCES
Castella, M. & Simonović, M. (2012). Faithfulness, Registers and Lexical Representations. Paper
presented at IGG 38, Verona, 2012.
Ernestus, M. (2000). Voice assimilation and segment reduction in casual Dutch. A corpus-based study
of the phonology-phonetics interface. Utrecht:LOT.
Kohler, K. J. (1999). Articulatory prosodies in German reduced speech. Proc. 14th ICPhS. 89-92.
Prince, A. & Smolensky, P. (1993/2004). Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative
Grammar. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell.
Oostendorp, M. van (1998). Style levels in conflict resolution. In Hinskens, van Hout & Wetzels
(eds.), Variation, Change and Phonological Theory. 207‐229.
BRETON VOCALIC QUANTITY IN THE CVCV PHONOLOGY FRAMEWORK
Katarzyna Bednarska
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
The paper takes up the problem of vowel length alternations in Breton, a Celtic language spoken in the
north of France.
Vowel lengthening in Breton is dependent on two factors: stress and the following consonantal
material. That is to say, only stressed vowels may be lengthened and only if they precede certain
consonants. The consonants that allow for the lengthening of the previous stressed vowels are, to use
traditional terminology, lenis. The ones that inhibit vowel lengthening are fortis. It is worth noting
that, as in other Celtic languages, the terms fortis and lenis are used with respect not only to obstruents
but also to sonorants, which also appear to have influence on vocalic quantity.
Interestingly enough, vowel length alternations before fortis/lenis are observed mostly in word medial
positions, i.e. when the consonant is followed by a phonetically realized vowel, e.g. madoù [ˈmaːdu]
‘good, pl.’ vs. latar [ˈlatar] ‘mist’. Word finally, on the other hand, fortis/lenis distinction seems to be
suspended and vowels lengthen both before fortis and lenis, as in e.g. mab [maːp] ‘son’ vs. pak [paːk]
‘packet’ (note voice neutralization in the case of mab [maːp] ‘son’, where the original consonant is a
lenis /b/).
In the case of sonorants, however, the situation is different. Vowel lengthening does occur before lenis
sonorants, e.g. kanañ [ˈkãːnã] ‘to sing’ - kan [kãːn] ‘song’, but before fortis sonorants no length
alternations are found: pennoù [ˈpenu] ‘head, pl.’ - penn [pen] ‘head’.
We postulate that these facts are best understood in the CVCV phonology approach, Scheer (2004) in
particular. We also employ the Element theory (e.g. Harris, 1994) and a recent hypothesis of Licensing
Absorption (Zdziebko, 2012).
We propose that it is the phonological makeup of consonants that is responsible for the vowel length
alternations in Breton. Fortis objects are hypothesized to contain a laryngeal element (H), while fortis
sonorants are headed (e.g. A). Lenis obstruents are devoid of laryngeal specification, and lenis
sonorants are headless.
As it is postulated in Lowenstamm (1996) and e.g. Scheer (2004), long vowels must be licensed.
Apparently, in Breton, vowels preceding fortis consonants are not licensed and therefore they are not
lengthened. To account for these facts, we propose a solution previously put forward in Zdziebko
(2012) in his analysis of the Scottish vowel lengthening. Namely, it is postulated that in Breton, fortis
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objects absorb licensing so that it never reaches the vowel to the left and thus disallows vowel
lengthening.
REFERENCES
Harris, J. English sound structure, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Larsen, B. U. Vowel length, raddoppiamento sintattico and the selection of the definite article in
Modern Italian. In Langues et grammaire II and II, phonologie, P. Sauzet (ed.), 87-102, Paris:
Universite Paris 8, 1998.
Lowenstamm, J. CV as the only syllable type. in Current Trends in Phonology Models and Methods,
In J. Durand and B. Laks (eds.), European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford, pp.
419-442.
Press, I. A grammar of Modern Breton, Berlin, New York, Amsterdam, Mouton de Gruyter, 1986.
Ternes, E., Propositions pour un systeme de prononciation standard du Breton. Zeitschrift fur
celtische Philologie 36, 180-198, 1977.
Scheer, T., A lateral theory of phonology. Vol. 1: what is CVCV and why should it be? Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter, 2004.
Zdziebko, S., Issues in Scottish vowel quantity. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
HOW MANY SEGMENTS? THEORIES OF SEGMENTAL REPRESENTATION AND THEIR GENERATIVE
CAPACITY
Florian Breit
University College London, UK
A frequent argument for an element-theoretic model of segmental representation (KLV 1985, Harris
1994, Harris & Lindsey 1995) is that its smaller generative capacity provides a better fit to the attested
data across languages, while classical feature-based models suffer from significant overgeneration
(e.g. Chen 2010, Backley 2011). However, little attempt has been made to provide a direct quantitative
comparison of the generative capacities of the two approaches.
Reiss (2012) argues that overgeneration is actually a desirable property for a theory of segmental
representation. His argument is based on the wide range of observed variation in size and content of
languages’ sound inventories, and the assumption that no generali ation about the impossibility of
further possible phones can be made simply from the fact that a phone is as of yet unattested.
In this paper I take a contrasting stance and argue for distinguishing different factors in evaluating the
generative capacity of segmental theories: possible segments, possible inventories and possible natural
classes. Only the prediction of a large number of inventories is desirable and necessary, while the sets
of possible segments and natural classes should be accounted for restrictively. This reflects the fact
that the sizes of individual inventories are limited (Crystal 2010 and the UPSID give between 11
phonemes for Rotokas and Piraha to 141 in !Xũ) and that a model that needs to appeal to fewer natural
classes to account sufficiently for phonological processes is more elegant and parsimonious.
Building on the work of Reiss (2012), I formally compare the generative capacities of Element Theory
(ET), Feature Theory (FT) and Underspecification Theory (UT). I show that FT is less powerful than
ET and ET less powerful than UT on all three measures, but that considering the number and nature of
the primitives (viz. features and elements) each theory relies upon, ET provides the best fit to the
above criteria.
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REFERENCES
Backley, P. 2011. An Introduction to Element Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Chen, Y.-L. 2010. How Powerful Are Elements? An Evaluation of the Adequacy of Element Theory in
Phonological Representations. MSc Dissertation. University of Edinburgh (Available:
http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5333)
Crystal, D. 2010. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (3rd Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p. 173
Harris, J. 1994. English Sound Structure. Oxford: Blackwell
Harris, J. & Lindsey, G. 1995. The elements of phonological representation. In: Durand, J. &
Katamba, F. (Eds.), Frontiers of phonology: atoms, structures, derivations. Harlow, Essex:
Longman, pp. 34-79
Kaye, J., Lowenstamm, J. and Vergnaud, J.-R. 1985. The internal structure of phonological elements:
a theory of charm and government. Phonology, 2. pp. 305-328
Reiss, C. 2012. Towards a bottom-up approach to phonological typology. In: Di Sciullo, A. M. (Ed.)
Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on Interfaces. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins
THE ASSESSMENT OF POLISH-ACCENTED ENGLISH BY IRISH NATIVE LISTENERS IN THE LIGHT OF
EMPIRICAL DATA.
Agnieszka Bryla-Cruz
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland
The massive exodus of Polish citizens to the British Isles in the recent years has resulted in the
situation in which English native speakers living there have become important interlocutors to a great
many Poles who have settled permanently or temporarily abroad. The paper presents the results of an
empirical study on the perception of Polish- accented English by Irish native listeners. The experiment
elicited the participants’ responses to Polish-English pronunciation regarding its perceived foreign
accentedness and annoyance triggered in listeners. The goal of the study is to determine which
phonetic features contribute most to each of these parameters. Establishing the hierarchy of most
foreign accented and most irritating features of Polish-English allows for formulating priorities in the
phonetic instruction of Poles (emigrants in particular) who intend to communicate with Irish native
speakers. The secondary objective of the present study is to investigate to which extent the judges’
decisions are conditioned by their own variety of English.
„ARE WE SANE? – OR WILL WELSH CONSONANT MUTATIONS GIVE COGNITIVE PHONOLOGISTS A
HEADACHE?”
Anita Buczek-Zawiła
Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland
Attempts to develop a cognitive version of phonology, which would, among other things, link ideas to
psychologically real events, encompass different views of certain principal concepts of phonological
structure. The revised concept of the phoneme category, the consistent focus on phoneticallymotivated, thus unconscious, automatic processes as opposed to phonemic alternations, the idea of
interrelatedness between members of different categories (involving overlap and neutralization) are the
main tenets as proposed by Nathan (2007, 2008), Taylor (1995, 2002) or Nesset (2008). These ar still
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developing proposals, therefore what is offered is an overview, illustrated with what appears to be a
fruitful area of problem cases – the initial consonant mutations in Welsh. These constitute an
interesting curiosity in that technically, within the parameters of Cognitive Phonology, they could
reasonably be treated as lenitions – automatic processes downplaying the characteristics of segments,
however, they most frequently evidence output forms which not only belong to the spaces of different
radial sets, but also appear in the form of the category prototypical member. Consequently, these
parings of segments, though probably phonetically motivated and dependent, would in most cases
classify as non-automatic, morphosyntactically grounded alternations rather than natural allophonic
variations. This raises certain questions as to the understanding of the nature of the investigated
phenomena in relation to somewhat conflicting concepts and postulates of Cognitive Phonology.
REFERENCES
Ball, Martin J. & Briony Williams. 2001. Welsh Phonetics. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.
Bauer, Laurie. 1988. What is lenition?. Journal of Lingistics 24. 381-392.
Griffen, Toby D. 1997. Welsh alveopalatals: Functional pattern attraction. Word 48/3. 353-366.
Nathan, Geoff S. 2007. Phonology. In Dirk Geeraerts & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford
Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. 611 – 631. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nathan, Geoff S. 2008. Phonology. A cognitive grammar introduction. Amsterdam/Philadephia: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Nesset, Tore. 2008. Abstract Phonology in a Concrete Model. Cognitive Linguistics and the
Morphology-Phonology Interface. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Taylor, John. R. 1995. Linguistic Categorization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, John. R. 2002. Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ARTICULATORY PREFERENCE VS. PERCEPTUAL ASSIMILATION--4 GROUP COMPARISON
Manni Chu
National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan
Jakobson et al. (1952) have demonstrated the necessities of distinctive feature, such as [grave] vs.
[acute] and [compact] vs. [diffuse] in order to incorporate vowels and consonants into the same
universal set, even though this proposed has been discarded by Chomsky and Halle (1968). In this
study, empirical evidence attempts to show that the preference of perceptual identification in
unreleased stops is dominant by the phonological production of vowels.
Four groups with different language backgrounds (Dutch (16), TSM (18), English (21) and French
(20) listeners) were recruited to participate in a identification of Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) final
stops, which mainly rely on the second formant transition (F2) (Chu 2009). All stimuli, CVC structure,
were possible rhymes1 in TSM and produced by a male TSM native with 2 different degree of noise
masking (0db and -20db) for manipulation. The logistic regression shows that /p/ is mostly correctly
identified and /-k/ is least. In /-ak/ to Dutch and English listeners, /-k/ can be correctly identified and to
French and TSM, /-k/ is misidentified as /-p/.
A possible explanation is the /ɑ/ in Dutch and English with the feature of [back], considered as
[grave]; /a/ in French and TSM with [front], considered as [acute]. Since Joos (1950) have claimed
that ‘the same artificial schematic stop can be easily judged as /p/ paired with [i] and [u], the most
diffuse; [k] with [a] the most compact.’ We extend that claim to argue that the same distinctive
1
No /up, ik, uk/ rhymes in TSM.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
features would prefer to co-occur. Since French and TSM with a front [a], more [acute] than the back
[a] of Dutch and English, they would prefer to choose the [p], the most [diffuse] among the stops,
when paired with the [a], the more [diffuse]. In short, the ability to identify an unreleased stop is
biased by the articulation of the native vowels.
Appendix
Language group
Dutch
English
French
TSM
/-ak/ distribution
Dutch
k>p>t>ʔ
The best to the worst score on the correct rate of coda identification
p > t > ʔ ~= k
p~= t > ʔ ~= k
p~=t > ʔ > k
p > t ~= ʔ ~=k
English
k>t>p>ʔ
French
p>k~=t>ʔ
TSM
p>t>ʔ>k
PROGRESSIVE VOICE ASSIMILATION IN POLISH
Eugeniusz Cyran
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Polish Progressive Voice Assimilation (PVA) concerns two fricatives, [v] and [ʒ] preceded by a
voiceless obstruent (/Tv/[Tf], /Tʒ/[Tʃ]), e.g. marchewek [marxɛvɛk] ‘carrot, gen.pl.’ vs. marchwi
[marxfji] ‘carrot, gen.’, or kra [kra] ‘ice floe’ vs. krze [kʃɛ] ‘ice floe, loc.’. The two fricatives are often
assumed to be sonorants in underlying representation which become obstruents in derivation. PVA is
puzzling in many respects. Firstly, the direction of assimilation contradicts the normal regressive one,
e.g. liczyc [ljitʃɨtɕ] ‘to count’ vs. licz-ba [ljidʒba] ‘number’. Secondly, there are cases in which PVA
does not take place and the resulting string [Tv], e.g. twój [tvuj] ‘your’, contradicts the general
phonotactic pattern of voice agreement in obstruent clusters – Regressive Voice Assimilation still does
not occur.
Most previous approaches to these data assumed some form of obstruentization rule (wv, rʒ) in
synchronic derivation, while the progressive direction of voice assimilation was either due to
syllabification driven voice licensing or progressive delaryngealization with subsequent spreading of
[–voice] or providing it by default . Such analyses necessarily involved rule ordering, but the biggest
problem with them is that they fail to account for forms like [tvuj]. This is due to two assumptions: i) a
fricative is an obstruent, especially if it features in voice alternations (v~f, ʒ~ʃ), and consequently, ii)
that there is a synchronic rule of obstruentization.
The analysis to be proposed fully embraces the intuition that the fricatives are related to sonorants and
that at least [v] still exhibits sonorant-like behaviour in modern Polish. A model of phonologyphonetics interaction is to be presented which enforces a different look at such concepts as ‘sonorant’,
‘obstruent’ and ‘obstruenti ation’. Obstruenti ation is deemed an impossible synchronic process as it
must take more than one step of changes in phonetic interpretation of a given representation and their
subsequent phonologization, neither can be associated with a phonological rule. This diachronic drift
towards obstruency excludes a one step/rule process. It will be shown that the process of
obstruentization of [v] is in fact not completed in Polish in the relevant contexts, while the
obstruentization of [ʒ] most probably is completed and should not be included in synchronic
derivations either. It will be argued that case of [Tʃ] are in fact lexicalized. They do not involve PVA
at all, and the alternation [r~ʒ] is morphophonological in nature, as suggested in Gussmann (2007).
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TYPE FREQUENCY AND ICONICITY: DISTRIBUTION OF POLISH DIMINUTIVE SUFFIXES
Bartłomiej Czaplicki
University of Warsaw, Poland
Polish diminutives are formed with two distinct suffixes +ek ([ɛk]) and +ik/yk ([ik], [ɨk]). Although
some phonology-related tendencies can be identified with respect to the base-final consonant (velars
tend to prefer +ek, while coronals predominantly appear with +ik/yk), the distribution of the two
suffixes is difficult to formalize. A great majority of base-final consonants allow both suffixes and the
choice between them appears to be lexically idiosyncratic, e.g. słu[p] ‘pole’ – słu[p]+ek vs. skle[p]
‘shop’ – skle[pʲ]+ik, sy[n] ‘son’ – sy[n]+ek vs. dywa[n] ‘carpet’ – dywa[ɲ]+ik and kefi[r] ‘kefir’ –
kefi[r]+ek vs. teat[r] ‘theater’ – teat[ʃ]+yk.
Since language is a dynamic system, valuable insight about diminutive allomorphy can be gleaned
from the direction of pattern extension in recently borrowed words. It is proposed that an explanatory
and predictive account of the direction of pattern extension must consider two factors: frequency of
use and expressive palatalization.
Under the view that language is a system that responds to frequency distributions of variants in the
input (Pierrehumbert 2002), it is hypothesized that the choice of the shape of the suffix for each basefinal consonant is determined by relative type frequency. However, it is shown that frequency of use is
not sufficient as it correctly predicts the direction of extension for some base-final consonants (e.g.
velars) but not for others. For example, in well-established words labials predominantly appear with
+ek but in recent words a form with +ik is favored in this context. This is taken as evidence for the
existence of a pressure that in this case countervails the impact of frequency of use, expressive
palatalization (EP).
EP exploits the iconic associations between sound and meaning. It corresponds to the high acoustic
frequency that characterizes palatal(ized) consonants and certain front vowels (as well as high pitch)
(Ohala 1994, Kochetov & Alderete 2011) and connotes the meaning of “smallness”, “childishness”
and “affection”. Direct evidence for an active role of EP in Polish is identified in hypocoristics and
certain unexpected patterns in diminutive formation. In the latter case, a well established
morphophonological pattern is being replaced by a novel pattern showing EP.
It is demonstrated that frequency of use and EP interact in conditioning the pattern extension of
diminutives. Cases are identified when EP is mute (due to a sound change that eliminated the phonetic
cues of palatalization) and frequency of use plays the major role. On the other hand, when the role of
frequency of use is diminished (the pattern is not very robust), EP comes to the fore. Particularly
interesting are those cases which show the impact of both pressures. Here a trading relation is visible.
A high degree of entrenchment of a pattern (its robustness) can outweigh the impact of EP and vice
versa.
In addition, the results are consistent with the findings that grammars are highly redundant and
speakers rely on low-level schemas, rather than on more general (and more economical from the point
of view of the requirements of a formal linguistic theory) rules (Dąbrowska 2008). This conclusion
provides support for lexicon-based approaches to phonology.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
IN POLISH SIBILANTS
Bartłomiej Czaplicki*, Marzena Żygis** & Daniel Pape***
*University of Warsaw, Poland **Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) & Humboldt University,
Germany ***IEETA+University of Aveiro, Portugal
There is strong ethological evidence of an iconic connection between high acoustic frequency and
smallness. This is associated with the fact that smaller and/or younger individuals have smaller vocal
tracts and emit higher-frequency sounds (Ohala 1994). In language, expressive palatalization exploits
sounds with high acoustic frequency, i.e. certain palatalized consonants and front vowels. It is
crosslinguistically used in sound symbolism, diminutives, hypocoristics and baby-talk to connote the
meaning of “smallness” and “affection” (Kochetov & Alderete 2011).
In this paper, we investigate a new development in the Polish sibilant system and propose an
explanation in terms of the iconicity of raised acoustic frequency related to palatalization. We report
that young women in the Warsaw area are currently shifting from the [s : ɕ : ʂ] contrast to the [s : sʲ : ʂ]
contrast, where [ɕ] changes to [sʲ].
In order to substantiate our perceptual impression, we conducted an acoustic experiment in which we
tested the alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕ/ and affricate /tɕ/ pronounced in words embedded in (i) a carrier
sentence and (ii) a coherent text. The sentences were repeated five times and the text was read twice.
We have analyzed recordings of 16 speakers aged 20-23.
Linear mixed effect models reveal the following significant effects of the new vs Standard Polish
variant: The maximum of the complete spectrum (20Hz-11kHz) is higher for the new variant (/ɕ/:
5452H vs 4176H , /tɕ/: 5517Hz vs 4163Hz). Further, with respect to the front cavity resonance, the
highest spectral peak in the frequency range from 3kHz to 6kHz is higher for the new variant (/ɕ/:
5289H vs 4200H , /tɕ/: 5391Hz vs 4300Hz). Next, the spectral moments COG and Standard
Deviation are higher for the new variant (COG values: /ɕ/: 5357H vs 4375H , /tɕ/: 5205Hz vs
4468Hz), and skewness, kurtosis and spectral regression slopes (m1, m2: split by 5kHz) differ when
comparing the new variant with the Standard Polish correspondent.
With respect to formant differences, we found that the values for F1, F2 and F3 differ for the
preceding vowel (F1: /ɕ/ 658H vs 710H , /tɕ/ 594Hz vs 662Hz; F2: /ɕ/ 1866H vs 1777H , /tɕ/
1794Hz vs 1691Hz; F3: /ɕ/ 2889H vs 2728H , /tɕ/ 2912Hz vs 2745Hz). For the following vowel,
only F3 shows significant differences (/ɕ/ 2958H vs 2831H ; /tɕ/ 2939Hz vs 2808Hz). Finally, the
formant rate for F1 is different for the preceding vowel (/ɕ/ -196H vs -36H ; /tɕ/ -121Hz vs -67Hz)
but not for the following vowel.
In summary, the acoustic results strongly suggest the Standard Polish alveolopalatals /ɕ tɕ/ are
undergoing acoustic changes. The fact that women have initiated the change finds explanation in its
sound-symbolic association with youth and politeness.
Another sociolinguistic aspect of this change is in line with the findings that adolescents are the most
likely to propagate innovations because peer pressures are the strongest among members of this age
group (Aitchison 2001). A strikingly similar development in the sibilant system has been reported in
Chinese dialects and is also associated with a “feminine accent” (Beckman 2012).
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GLOTTALIZATION AND THE LARYNGEAL NODE FAITHFULNESS IN ENGLISH
Iwona Czyżak
Siedlce University of Natural Science and Humanities, Poland
An optional allophonic phenomenon of stop glottalization, often regarded as one of the most
conspicuous characteristics of Cockney, has been reported to be spreading rapidly into a number of
other English accents including RP. Being still a process in progress, it exhibits high intra- and
interspeaker variability. However, when the picture reach in phonetic detail is trimmed and slightly
simplified, it may be noticed that in more conservative varieties of English glottalization, especially tglottalling, has been first accepted in word final pre-consonantal (primarily pre-obstruent) and prepausal environments. The observation that these positions coincide with the ones where English
plosives tend to lack audible release constitutes a starting point of the present analysis.
Namely, we argue that whenever the stop in question is inaudibly released, its realisation with [spread
glottis] is dispreferred on the grounds that aspiration is best cued when audible release is present.
Furthermore, assuming that the laryngeal contrast in English stops relies on the underlying [spread
glottis] in fortis versus empty laryngeal node in lenis series, it is postulated that in order to avoid
neutralisation resulting from the loss of surface [spread glottis], the form with glottalization becomes
optimal. In this way the surface contrast with the laryngealy empty stops is maintained, albeit by
means of a new feature, that is [constricted glottis]. In OT parlance, this corresponds to a high ranking
of a faithfulness constraint against delinking laryngeal node, i.e. MaxLarNode. Additionally, the
absence of release obscures the information concerning the stop’s identity in terms of place features
which then may be lost. Eventually, whenever a variably ranked markedness constraint enforcing
weakening of Place assumes a high position in the ranking, optional replacement of the fortis alveolar
plosive with [ʔ] may be observed.
Although glottaling rather than glottal reinforcement constitutes the main focus of the current analysis,
it is also shown that [ʔt] variant can be accounted for by the same mechanism. Another issue raised in
the present discussion is why English t-glottalling is not a straightforward case of debuccalisation,
understood as delinking of supralaryngeal features. If this were a case mere delinking of
suprasegmental features in fortis plosives, which are underlyingly specified for [spread glottis], should
result in [h] rather than [ʔ]. Instead, a feature swapping operation, replacing [spread glottis] with
[constricted glottis], seems to be employed.
CONSONANTAL ALTERNATIONS AND STRESS IN SOUTHERN SAAMI
Guillaume Enguehard
Paris 7, France
1. Southern Saami (< Saami < Finno-Ugric, Sweden/Norway) shows consonantal alternations between
stressed and unstressed suffixes or personal pronouns (BERGSLAND, 1982)
(1): the stressed form has more consonantal material than the unstressed one.
(1) stressed
unstressed
Gloss
a.
prɔwnɑɑlt-ɑhkə
tʃɑɑl-əkə
inscription ~ two intertwined strands (deverbal
suffix)
b.
sɑtnə
sɑn
he/she/it
c.
kɑɑmək-ɑssə
pyoerk-əsə
shoe-illativeSg ~ meat-illativeSg
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
A moraic analysis of the alternation in (1c) has been proposed by VINKA (1997). However, this
proposal doesn't account for the alternations that imply another consonant, in (1a-b). My aim in this
paper is to argue that the alternations in (1) are involved by stress.
2. Southern Saami shows also a weight constraint on the stressed syllable of stems. This constraint is
particularly remarkable in borrowings. Compare, in (2), the Southern Saami forms (first column) with
their Continental Scandinavian sources (the second column).
(2)
a.
b.
c.
Southern Saami
nuɔrhtə
tɔɑpmɑɑ
pɑɑrrə
Continental Scandinavian
nurd
dom
bɑɑrə
Gloss
north
judgement
only
3. Both phenomena in §1 and §2 are manifested by the same mechanism (occurrence of an additional
segment) on the right of stressed vowels, and taking different shapes depending on the identity of the
following consonant:
(i) emergence of an aspiration before a voiceless plosive (1a-2a),
(ii) emergence of a homorganic voiceless plosive before a nasal (1b-2b)
(iii) gemination elsewhere (1c-2c).
4. These three processes are in complementary distribution. They should receive a single
underlying representation. In the CVCV framework (LOWENSTAMM, 1996), these stressed syllables
contain an additional CV unit. Following LARSEN (1998), I assume that this additional CV is the
exponent of stress and is located to the right of the stressed vowel.
As for the segmental content of this additional CV, the aspiration in (1a-2a), the voiceless plosive in
(1b-2b) and the geminate in (1c) share the absence of voicing. The additional segments occuring in
(1b-2b) and (1c-2c) have no inherent place features (they inherit them from the following consonant).
The three cases in §3 can thus be analysed as involving an additional CV+aspiration. Adopting the
Element Theory (KLV, 1985), I assume the underlying identity of the additional segment to be h 0.
Note that in the gemination case, h doesn't surface before sonorants: the last propagates.
5. As a conclusion, I have argued that the data in (1-2) result from a unique mechanism associated to
stress. The underlying manifestation of stress is an additional CV+aspiration.
REFERENCES
Bergsland, Knut, (1982). Sydsamisk Grammatikk. Tromso, Bergen, Oslo:Universitetsforlaget.
Larsen, Uffe Bergeton, (1998). ≪ Vowel length, Raddoppiamento Sintattico and the selection of the
definite article in Italian ≫. in P. Sauzet (ed.), Langues et Grammaire II-III : Phonologie. Paris:
Universite Paris 8.
Lowenstamm, Jean, (1996). “CV as the only Syllable Type.” In Durand J. & Laks B. (eds.), Current
Trends in Phonology : Models and Methods. Manchester: ESRI.
Vinka, Michael, (1997). “Syllabification in Southern Sami.” Working Papers, n.46. Lund: Lund
University.
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APPROACHES IN PRONUNCIATION TEACHING: HISTORY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
Sasha Euler
Trier, Germany
This session first discusses various (prosodic) approaches to pronunciation teaching that have been
proposed over the years, and which views on language and on how language components interlock
were proposed in these approaches. In a second step a new rhythm & connected speech-based
approach is presented more in detail, emphasizing how this type of phonological structuring
considerably increases the teachability of the English phonological system in ELT.
In ELT the notion of approach is defined by views on language learning, on language itself and on
how language constituents interlock in syllabus design. Based on the premises of CLT, the latter two
aspects are also utilized in approaches to teaching specific aspects of a language, a famous example of
which being Lewis’ Lexical Approach. Over the years various such approaches have been proposed
for pronunciation teaching. While early segmental approaches were replaced by more meaningful
intonation-based approaches in the 1980s, the practical realization of these approaches tends to be
quite unsystematic, often ignoring phonetic form and reciprocal connections with other phonological
features entirely. Some alternatives that were proposed are Teschner & Whitley’s stress-based
approach, Chela-Flores’ rhythm-based approach and a connected speech-based approach proposed by
JD Brown and developed by myself. These approaches, while in principle all prosodic in nature, are
founded on different views of language and how language constituents interlock. They are based on
the premise that the phonetic and phonological system of English can be learned and taught more
effectively if a certain structuring of language components is employed. In this, Chela-Flores’ rhythmbased approach makes an important first step in that it takes the rhythmic timing of English as the
foundation on which everything else should be based. My version of a connected speech-based
approach develops connected speech features as a logical consequence of the rhythmic timing of
English, which is then realized in teaching practice. Basing a syllabus structure on a solid
understanding and concept of how phonological features interlock can create a cognitive framework
for students to fit individual aspects into, which in turn increases the teachability of English phonology
considerably. In an empirical study with advanced English students at a German university and at a
private language school I have found that with such a connected speech-based approach students come
to see pronunciation as an integral component of oral language and understand and appreciate that
aspects like rhythm, pitch prominence and connected speech features together shape English and make
the language what it is. Instruction using such an approach can have clear effects on learners’
comprehension of authentic spoken English as well as on their own production and interlocutors’
perception of their accent.
PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL PARAMETERS IN INDIVIDUAL SPEECH CHARACTERIZATION
Wiktor Gonet
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland
Speech and voice identification, often referred to as speaker recognition, comparison, or
discrimination, implemented in practical contexts such as engineering applications or forensic
analysis, relies upon speech and voice characterization done at numerous levels of study (phonetic,
phonological, phonostylistic, syntactic, stylistic, register-related, pragmatic) that differ in methodology
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
(auditory vs. acoustic; machine vs. human, qualitative vs. quantitative), reliability (objective vs.
subjective, impressionistic vs. standardized) and evidence strength (categorical vs. probabilistic).
The fields of phonetics and phonology, albeit often regarded as inextricably interwoven, are a good
example of disciplines based upon totally different methodological axioms, and can serve as a good
example showing how employment of different principles can collaborate in reaching a reliable
substantive conclusion. And conversely, an analysis of a specific problem can shed light as to what
methods should be employed, and underscore the methodological rudiments underlying each of these
two disciplines.
In this paper, phonetic and phonological analytical planes are reviewed with regard to the
methodological foundations, and a standardized speaker/voice comparative framework is suggested.
The need for solid standards is motivated by the direct impact that results of such study may have
upon the functioning of voice-operated devices (voice locks, voice safeguarding systems, voice crisis
control, etc.) and in law enforcing institutions as advisory information that often constitutes sole trial
evidence.
PHONOLOGICAL INDICATORS OF FORMULAIC STATUS: A STUDY OF L1 AND L2 SPEECH OF POLISH
ADVANCED LEARNERS OF ENGLISH.
Ewa Guz
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Phonological cues are considered valid indicators of formulaicity as they offer direct insight into the
nature of speech processing and reveal the structural differences between formulaic and nonformulaic
utterances (Moon 1997; Wray 2002, 2004). Formulaic sequences have been reported to display
‘phonological coherence’ (Hickey 1993, Lin 2010) in that they exhibit a number of phonological
properties such as the absence of hesitation phenomena, fewer pauses, unbroken intonation contour
and single tone units. Non-formulaic material, on the other hand, is characterized by a higher
incidence of pauses and a greater susceptibility to dysfluencies (e.g. Van Lancker, Canter and Terbeek
1981). Research indicates that it is the insertion and location of pauses which reflects the cognitive
effort involved in speech construction fairly accurately, and that, as a result, pausing occurs less
frequently when speakers retrieve formulaic material from memory (Pawley 1986, Dahlmann and
Adolphs 2007, Erman 2007, Lin and Adolphs 2009). In this study, we seek to explore the distribution
of pauses as a potential marker of formulaic status. The analysis is based on a 22,000 word data set
consisting of speeches delivered in Polish and English by fifty three Polish academic students enrolled
at the second year of a three-year teacher training program. The data include both the recordings and
their transcriptions annotated for pauses (both filled and unfilled). The phonological chunks derived in
the course of the pause annotation procedure are juxtaposed with the formulaic sequences identified in
both data sets. A number of patterns of pause distribution are identified corresponding to the degree of
the overlap between phonological and formulaic boundaries. Basing on the assumption that L1
formulaic sequences are picked up in childhood from naturalistic spoken input as (phonological)
wholes (e.g. Peters 1983, Wray 2008) and L2 formulas are first learnt as combinations of individual
words which later develop into a fluent form, we predict a closer correspondence between
phonological and formulaic units in the L1 data set.
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THE INFLUENCE OF PHONEME DURATION, ENERGY AND FREQUENCY FEATURES ON THE
PROMINENCE OF ACCENT AND SENTENCE BOUNDARIES IN SPOKEN POLISH
Magdalena Igras & Bartosz Ziółko
AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
Selected prosodic features of Polish phonemes were analysed statistically in order to determine
whether their occurrence correlates with a phoneme’s position in a sentence, with a particular focus on
stress and sentence boundaries.
The analysed data were taken from CORPORA, a Polish speech database containing annotated
recordings of 5130 sentences and 9810 isolated words produced by 45 speakers (male, female and
children). For each phoneme, mean values of phoneme duration, energy and power of the phoneme as
well as the fundamental frequency of voiced phonemes were calculated. The distribution of these
features in the entire database was visualized.
With regard to average values, statistically significant differences in the examined data were
investigated. The phenomenon of pre-boundary lengthening of phonemes was described as well as a
decrease of energy and pitch at the end of affirmative sentences. The results can be used for automatic
punctuation recognition in spoken language. In accented syllables, stress was observed as a significant
increase of total energy of phonemes and the ratio of energy per second to pitch accent was
characterized by a local increase of F0. The accent measures were analysed for both sentences and
isolated words. The phenomena were also examined in relation to the number of syllables in a word.
The correlations were demonstrated quantitatively for all processed data. The methods of analysis and
the obtained data were presented and compared to the expected values from phonetic and phonological
literature. The results of the study will be used for language modelling in an automatic speech
recognition system developed at AGH.
DECADENCE OF LABIALS IN POLISH – PHONETICS OR PHONOLOGY?
Krzysztof Jaskuła
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Careful listening to everyday speech in Poland sometimes brings unforeseen results as regards the
easiness with which the speakers eliminate some speech sounds from some words with no detriment to
the meaning. Perhaps it should not be surprising that fluency and rapid speech allow the speakers to
simplify the pronunciation of many words in everyday life. However, when one turns on the television
or the radio, one expects people speaking more carefully. This carefulness is not frequently observed,
though.
Over thirty years ago deletions of consonants or contractions/reductions of vowels were observed by
Biedrzycki (1978: 66ff.) who treated them as common in colloquial language. He also proposed that
the so-called ‘redundant phonemes’ might be recogni ed in Polish.
What now seems to be a tendency in careless pronunciation is dropping intervocalic consonants such
as [w, v, vj, mj], occasionally [b] and, sporadically, also [f]. All this may have purely phonetic causes,
mainly in the case of [w], similar to the elimination of the middle part of triphthongs in English
(Gimson 1980: 139-141). However, in English both the middle sounds, i.e. [ɪ] and [ʊ], are deleted,
while in Polish the palatals are rarely unpronounced by careless speakers. Although Biedrzycki does
not exactly specify the place of articulation of the absent sounds he mentions, it seems evident that this
trend is connected with deleting segments specified by the commonly-known feature [labial]. The
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
issue is particularly interesting given that Cyran and Gussmann (1999) observe that labial sounds,
especially stops, are relatively strong segments in Polish in terms of phonology. In this paper, utilizing
the assumptions and tools of Government Phonology, we will take a look at what consonants are
deleted in what environments with a view to establishing a pattern and finding out whether there are
any phonological reasons for this phenomenon.
SHOW ME WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF: THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH VELARS
Artur Kijak
University of Silesia, Poland
The primary aim of this paper is to discuss the elemental make-up of English velar consonants. The
secondary, no less important, one is to point out the intimate phonological relationship between two
articulatorily unrelated consonant classes: velars and labials. The logic behind this two-pillar approach
is implicational, i.e. simply because both classes interact phonologically, they are predicted to have
similar structures. More specifically, following Backley (2011), we argue for the presence of the
element ǀUǀ in the content of both velars and labials. This proposal stands in sharp opposition to the
Element Theory (ET) mainstream solution where velars are not specified for any resonance elements
at all, e.g. Huber 2007. Interestingly, the attempts to capture the relationship between velars and
labials have been made since Jakobson and Halle (1956) by various segmental models including the
recent ones, e.g. ET (Harris and Lindsay 1995:29, Scheer 2004, Backley 2011). Since what counts
most for ET is the phonological behavior rather than phonetic details, the adoption of this theoretical
model serves two purposes. First, it relates to the general conference theme and secondly, it is a
perfect tool for the analysis of the sound system of earlier stages in the development of a language.
And it is the historical data, along with some contemporary processes, that provide robust evidence for
the proposal. Thus this paper takes a closer look at some historical developments, e.g. OE breaking,
ME diphthongization before the voiceless and voiced velar fricative, e.g. OE dohtor > ME dohter >
douhter, doughter ‘daughter’ and OE dragan > ME dragen > drawen ‘draw’ respectively, or the
labialization of the velar fricative in the word-final position, e.g. laughen > laugh, laffe ‘laugh’.
Moreover, I discuss the problem of historical vocalization which affected the velarized l and led to
various qualitative and quantitative vocalic developments like, for example, 15th century
diphthongization before [ɫ], e.g. balk > baulke ‘baulk, balk’. Finally, I explore the examples of
vocalization taking place in some contemporary varieties of English, e.g. Estuary English. The general
conclusion I draw from the analysis boils down to the observation that the relationship between labials
and velars can be easily captured if we postulate the presence of ǀUǀ not only in the content of labials
and /u, w/ but, first and foremost, in velars. What differentiates both categories is the status played by
this element, i.e. in labials ǀUǀ functions as the head, while in velars it is an operator.
REFERENCES
Backley, Ph. 2011. An introduction to Element Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Harris, J. & G. Lindsey 1995. The elements of phonological representation. In J. Durand & F.
Katamba (eds.), Frontiers of phonology: atoms, structures, derivations, 34-79. London & New
York: Longman.
Huber, D. 2007. Velars and processes: their treatment in phonological theory. PhD. dissertation.
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Jakobson, R. & M. Halle 1956. Fundamentals of language. The Hague: Mouton.
Scheer, T. 2004. A Lateral Theory of Phonology. Vol. 1: What is CVCV, and why should it be? Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
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ARTICULATORY GROUNDING OF PHONEMIC DISTINCTIONS IN ENGLISH
Grzegorz Krynicki
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
The aim of the experiment described in this paper was to devise and test a procedure that would allow
identification of a phoneme extracted from continuous utterance on the basis of only tongue-to-palate
and bilabial (EPG+B) contacts that accompanied its production. The hypothesis underlying this study
was that the articulatory correlates of the phonemic distinctive features, despite the unstable character
of these correlates in comparison to acoustic realisations (Pierrehumbert 2000: 6), can be induced
statistically from dimensionality-reduced EPG+B data. Most phoneme-recognition studies so far used
posterior probabilities of symbolic articulatory features rather than physical data as observations in
their classifiers (Bates et al. 2007: 84).
The system used to obtain EPG+B data was CompleteSpeech Palatometer. It comes with an artificial
palate of 124 electrodes recording EPG+B contacts at 100Hz. The system was used on a single
subject, a 24 year old female speaker of General American, reading 140 phonetically balanced
sentences from TIMIT database (Fisher et al. 1986), alphabet and numerals. The prompts were
phonemically transcribed using Penn Forced Aligner (Jiahong and Liberman 2008). The database
contains 16 min. of speech, 1254 words and 5303 phonemes. Time alignment between the phonemic
and EPG+B information consisted in finding the time point in the middle of each phoneme and
obtaining EPG+B data available for the nearest time point.
The EPG+B information was transformed into a set of linguistically meaningful and computationally
manageable parameters – dimensionality reduction indices (DRI) using modified techniques
developed by Hardcastle et al. (1991b, c.f. Carreira-Perpinan and Renals 1998). 11 DRI’s were
calculated for each EPG+B matrix: the number of electrode activations in the alveolar (ALV), palatal
(PAL) and velar regions (VEL), total number of contacts (TOT), centre of gravity (COG), posterior
centre of gravity (POS), anterior centre of gravity (ANT), laterality (LAT), asymmetry (ASY),
frication (FRI) and bilabiality (BIL).
Forward-selection Discriminant Analysis was used to predict the classification of each phoneme based
on its EPG+B parameters. 3210 cases were used to develop the model that discriminated among the all
39 phonemes. The classifier trained on both vowels and consonants performed with 22.96% success
rate. The model included all parameters, listed in the decreasing order of influence on the classification
result: FRI, BIL, ALV, PAL, TOT, VEL, ASY, ANT, COG, LAT, POS. The most frequent
assignment of a phoneme to a phoneme category, regardless whether correct or not, was the
assignment of NG to R category (probability of 30.38%). The result of classification restricted to all
and only R and NG phonemes was 92.34%, with significant contributing parameters (in decreasing
order of importance): PAL, COG, POS, ASY, BIL and ALV. Similar analysis of all pairs and groups
of phonemes allows to approximate articulatory correlates of features distinctive for these phonemes.
REFERENCES
Pierrehumbert, J. 2000. The phonetic grounding of phonology. Les Cahiers de l'ICP, Bulletin de la
Communication Parlée, 5. Pp. 7-23.
Bates, R. - M. Ostendorf and R. Wright. 2007. Symbolic phonetic features for modeling of
pronunciation variation. Speech Communication. 49(2). Pp. 83-97.
Fisher, W.M., Doddington, M., George, R., and Goudie-Marshell, K.M. 1986 The DARPA Speech
Recognition Database: Specifications and Status. In Proceedings of the DARPA Speech
Recognition Workshop, Report No. SAIC-86/1546.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
Jiahong Yuan and Mark Liberman. 2008. Speaker identification on the SCOTUS corpus. Proceedings
of Acoustics '08.
Hardcastle, W.J. - Gibbon, F.E. and K. Nicolaidis. 1991b. EPG data reduction methods and their
implications for studies of lingual coarticulation. J. of Phonetics 19. Pp. 251–266.
Carreira-Perpinan and Renals. 1998. Dimensionality reduction of electropalatographic data using
latent variable models. Speech Communication 26(4). Pp. 259-282.
ARTICULATORY STUDIES OF THE POLISH SOUND SYSTEM
Anita Lorenc & Radosław Święciński
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland
Polish is a language that receives much attention in both phonetic and phonological literature.
However, there are few reliable and up-to-date descriptions of the actual articulation of Polish sounds.
After decades of stagnation in the area of articulatory studies of Polish, there is a need for an accurate
account of the contemporary Polish sound system. To meet this need, research is carried out at the
Faculty of Humanities in Lublin with the use of 3-dimensional electromagnetic articulography.
This paper aims to present latest research in the area of articulatory phonetics of Polish conducted
since 2009 with the use of the AG500 articulograph. First, we present a pilot study involving two
speakers of Polish, one with normative and the other with disordered pronunciation, who provided
articulatory data that was used to create detailed descriptions and 2-D animations (Trochymiuk, A.,
Święciński, R. 2009). They were later employed in the creation of an award-winning educational
website fonem.eu.
Secondly, we would like to present selected phonetic and phonological issues related to an on-going
project titled “Polish Language Pronunciation. Analysis Using Three-Dimensional Electromagnetic
Articulography,” whose main objective is to create a detailed account of the basic reali ations of
Polish phonemes. The study entails recording three types of signal—articulographic, multi-channel
audio and high-speed video—in a specifically selected group of 20 native speakers of Polish (10 men
and 10 women). The relations between thus acquired data will be modelled with the use of a Dynamic
Bayesian Network and stored in a relational database.
REFERENCE
Trochymiuk, A., Święciński R. 2009. ‘Wymowa gr bietowa. Studium pr ypadku.’ Logopedia. Tom
38. Polskie Towarzystwo Logopedyczne. 173-201.
EXAMINING INCOMPLETE NEUTRALIZATION IN RUSSIAN:
EVIDENCE FROM PSEUDO-NOUNS
Mayuki Matsui
Hiroshima University, Japan
Synopsis: This paper examines the incomplete-neutralization effect in Russian by using pseudonouns.
The results of the production experiment suggest that neutralization is incomplete.
Background: Russian is one of the languages in which underlying voiced obstruents devoice in
domain-final position, resulting in voicing neutrali ation (e.g. /rok/ [rok] ‘fate’ vs. /rog/ [rok] ‘horn’).
However, neutralization may be incomplete: small but consistent acoustic/ perceptual differences have
been observed between putative neutrali ed sounds in many languages (Port and O’Dell 1985, Röttger
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et al. 2011 for German; Dinnsen and Charles-Luce 1984 for Catalan; Warner et al. 2004 for Dutch;
Dmitrieva et al. 2010 for Russian, and more). On the other hand, some researchers argue that such an
effect is merely due to a methodological artifact (e.g. Fourakis and Iverson 1984). In addition,
increasing evidence suggests that word-specific factors such as word frequency should be taken into
account (e.g. Pierrehumbert 2001). Therefore, the actual status of neutralization and its implications to
phonology have still been open to debate.
In the case of Russian, neutralization was shown to be incomplete under the condition that the
speakers read existing words (Dmitrieva et al., 2010). This paper examines whether incomplete
neutralization is observed also in the production of Russian pseudo-nouns by adopting a strategy
similar to the one proposed in Röttger et al. (2011).
A production experiment: The experiment was designed to examine whether neutralization is
incomplete or not, under the condition that orthography and word frequency effects are controlled. 30
minimal pairs were examined. All were non-sense pseudo-nouns containing a stop or a fricative in
word-final position. By employing the auditory stimuli (genitive plural forms), the target nouns
(nominative singular forms) were elicited from 12 native speakers of Russian. The results showed that
the duration of the vowel preceding the underlying voiced stops was significantly longer than that
preceding the underlying voiceless stops. Also, voicing into closure/ frication duration was
significantly different between underlying voiced and voiceless obstruents. The results suggest that
neutralization is incomplete, and that morphophonemic (underlying) difference contributes to such
acoustic differences.
Summary: This paper addresses the question whether neutralization is incomplete or not, which has
been one of the long outstanding questions in phonetics-phonology interface. The results of the
production experiment showed that incomplete neutralization was found even in the pseudo-nouns that
were elicited in response to auditory stimuli, suggesting that morphophonemic difference does
contribute to the phenomenon of incomplete neutralization in Russian.
FORMAL RESTRICTIONS ON SUPERNUMERARY CONSONANTS AT WORD EDGES IN ENGLISH
Grzegorz Michalski
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
This paper proposes a formal treatment of obstruent clusters in monomorphemic words in English,
analysed within a Government Phonology-based setting. The proposal is to constrain the complexity
of these clusters by restricting the number of melodic primes and skeletal slots available to
supernumerary segments, at the cost of breaking away from one-to-one correspondence between
phonological representation and phonetic interpretation.
The cases at hand are initial triples of the STR type, and final doubles of the ST/TS/TT type, where S
stands for [s]-like fricative, T for plosive, and R for sonorant. In STR initials and ST/TS finals the only
sound found at S is [s], while [t] is the only sound to occupy the peripheral T in TT finals. The sole
other final obstruent double in semantically non-vacuous words is [ft]. On standard accounts (e.g.
Kaye 1992, Scheer 2004), each segment occupies a separate syllabic constituent, and its Government
and Licensing demands are accounted for. This may imply that any consonant of the relevant manner
of articulation should also be able to occupy the slots in question, contrary to fact.
Two solutions are submitted for discussion. The less radical solution is to constrain the melody of the
peripheral segment in STR initials, TS/TT, and [ft] finals to a single manner-defining element, viz. {h}
for [s], and {ʔ} for [t]. This entails that coronal be the unmarked, if not underspecified, place of
33
APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
articulation in English. The missing voice specification is derivable. This does not reduce the number
of skeletal slots in STR initials, nor does it concern ST finals.
For STR initials a more radical solution is also proposed: to fuse the elementary melody of S ({h})
into that of T ({ʔ} and a POA specifier, if any), so that two obstruents are represented as one, without
Magic Licensing or what have you. The idea of contoured segments in this context is not innovative —
Scheer (2004: 444) refers to earlier proposals of this sort — but finds a new application for final
doubles. ST finals can also be reduced to single expressions: {ʔ} (as the head), {h}, and a POA
specifier for the plosive part, viz. labial or dorsal. This can also accommodate the heavy [kst] final in
text within limits of Government, i.e. two empty nuclei in a row; if [st] can be represented solely as
{h•ʔ}, it might explain the lack of other, more complex ST parts in TST finals.
PHONETIC CONTRIBUTION TO PHONOLOGY IN LESSER-STUDIED LANGUAGES: EVIDENCE FROM
NEZ PERCE
Katherine Nelson
Rice University, USA
This paper discusses the intersection of acoustic phonetics and phonology, demonstrating the
importance of conducting an acoustic study to provide evidence either supporting the previous
phonological analyses or suggesting an alternate analysis. In this study I use acoustic evidence from
Nez Perce, an American Indigenous language of the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
Some aspects of Nez Perce had been acoustically studied prior to this work: voice onset time for
ejectives and stops (Aoki 1970; Maddieson 2001) and glottalized sonorants (Aoki 1970; Um 2001).
The work discussed in this paper is the first detailed acoustic work on all aspects of the language and
the first acoustic work on any aspect of the vowel system. Data from the vowel system and the vowel
harmony system will be discussed in the paper.
Nez Perce has an unusual five-vowel system, /i, æ, a, o, u/, rather than canonical five-vowel system, /i,
e, a, o, u/. This unusual vowel inventory leads to the seemingly unrelated dominant, /i, a, o/, and
recessive, /i, æ, u/, vowel harmony groups. The generally accepted analysis for Nez Perce vowel
harmony is advanced tongue root (ATR), however some researchers question this ATR analysis as it
does not account for all of the data. An acoustic study of the vowel harmony system and vowels
suggests an alternate analysis based on the principle of maximal contrast (Liljencrants and Lindblom
1972) and the hyperspace effect (Johnson, Flemming and Write 1993).
This alternative analysis would not have been developed without an acoustic study of the vowels,
supporting the importance of acoustic phonetic analyses to provide supporting data for the
phonological analyses.
REFERENCES
Aoki, Haruo. 1970. ‘A note on glottali ed consonants.’ Phonetica 21:65-74.
Johnson, Keith and Edward Flemming and Richard Wright. 1993. ‘The hyperspace effect: Phonetic
Targets are hyperarticulated.’ Language 69:505-28.
Liljencrants, Johan and Bjorn Lindblom. 1972. ‘Numerical simulation of vowel quality systems: The
role of perceptual contrast.’ Language. 48:839-62.
Maddieson, Ian. 2001. ‘Good timing: Place-dependent voice onset time in ejective stops.’ Eurospeech.
823-26.
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Um, Hye-Young. 2001. ‘Typology of glottali ed sonorants: distributional patterns and phonetic
explanations.’ Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology. 7:333- 52.
PREDICTING VOWEL LENGTH PRODUCTION IN A SECOND LANGUAGE:
PHONETIC VERSUS PHONOLOGICAL CONTRASTIVE ANALYSES
Katharina Nimz
Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
In the field of German as a Foreign Language (GFL), it is common to rely on contrastive analyses
between the sound systems of the native and target language in order to predict production errors by
foreign language learners (Redecker & Grzeszczakowska- Pawlikowska 2009: 116). In this study, we
investigated vowel productions by late Turkish learners of GFL by means of a production experiment
and compared the obtained acoustic data to those of a German native speaker control group (N=8 per
group). Both measurements of vowel quality (F1 and F2) and vowel quantity (duration in ms) were
collected; the focus of this abstract will be on the quantity data and on which level of analysis
(phonetic or phonological) may best predict our results.
On a phonological level, Turkish has quite unanimously been described as a language with eight
contrastive vowels, which can systematically be differentiated by the features vowel height, frontness,
and rounding (see Lotz 1962 or Trubetzkoy 1969). Besides these three common features, German
further makes use of vowel length as a contrastive dimension (Ternes 2012), and thus differentiates
vowels such as short /a/ versus long /a:/. Focusing on the production of vowel length, it would be
assumed then – based on a phonological contrastive analysis – that Turkish learners of GFL would
have problems producing vowel length contrasts (as for example suggested by Rolffs 2005). However,
on a surface phonetic level, Turkish does make use of long vowels, as vowels preceding the so called
“yumuşak g” ([ɣ], <ğ>) are consistently lengthened while the velar fricative [ɣ] is not pronounced, for
example çiğ [tʃi:] („awalanche“) or ağrı [a:rɯ] („pain“) (see Kirchner 1999, and also our own
exploratory acoustic data of Turkish minimal pairs, which were collected during the same
experimental session). Based on a surface phonetic analysis then, one would predict that vowel length
might in fact not be problematic for Turkish learners.
Figure 1: Results for quantity dimension
The results of our picture naming task go in hand with the predictions based on a phonetic contrastive
analysis (in contrast a phonological one), as Turkish learners did not differ significantly in their vowel
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
length productions from German native speakers (with two exceptions)2 (s. Figure 1). However, other
explanations need to be discussed, as well, such as for example the assumption that vowel length is
always easy to acquire, despite the native language background of the learners (Bohn 1995).
REFERENCES
Bohn, O.-S. (1995). Cross-language speech perception in adults: First language transfer doesn't tell it
all. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience. Issues in Cross-Language
Research (pp. 279–304). Baltimore: York Press.
Kirchner, M. (1999). Türkisch ğ, Deutsch r. In L. Johanson & J. Rehbein (Eds.), Turcologica: Vol. 39.
Türkisch und Deutsch im Vergleich (pp. 139–151). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Lotz, J. (1962). Thoughts on phonology as applied to the Turkish vowels. In N. Poppe (Ed.), American
Studies in Altaic Linguistics (pp. 343–351). Indiana: University Publications.
Redecker, B., & Grzeszczakowska-Pawlikowska, B. (2009). Phonetik im Fremdsprachen-unterricht:
Aktuelle Ansichten und Aussichten. IDV-Magazin, (81), 114–145.
Rolffs, S. (2005). Türkisch. In U. Hirschfeld (Ed.), Phonetik International. Von Afrikaans bis Zulu.
Kontrastive Studien für Deutsch als Fremdsprache. CD-ROM (4th edition, pp. 1–16).
Waldsteinberg: Popp.
Ternes, E. (2012). Einführung in die Phonologie (3rd edition). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft.
Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1969). Principles of Phonology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
“FLESH AND BLOOD PRONUNCIATION TEACHER GOES TO THE INTERNET PHONETIC
TEACHER…”: REVIEW OF INTERNET PHONETIC RESOURCES IN 2013
Marta Nowacka
University of R es ów, Poland
This article aims to review and recommend a selection of quality Internet phonetic resources which
might be of some assistance not only to the beginner in this field but also to a more advanced phonetic
reader. As a teacher of English phonetics and pronunciation, I am frequently asked to recommend
some online resources to help the first year students work on their pronunciation or learn transcription
etc. On the other hand, linguistics seminar students, whose theses focus on different kinds of
Englishes, require, e.g. some guidance with reference to the material for accent analysis. It is hoped
that these two groups of readers should find the review beneficial because it contains some advice on
online English phonetic transcription tools, accent archives, language corpora, dictionaries of
phonetics and linguistics and many others. So far, to become familiar with phonetics in the net my
students have been directed to some already existing phonetic websites recommendations, e.g. by
Dillon (2003), Stasiak-C yżak (2006) and Sobkowiak (2010), however, some of these links are nonexistent now. Therefore, I set out to do my own examination of the said sites and filtered them through
my own and the students’ ‘wants and needs’ to create this evaluation.
The list of phonetic resources presented here, all active in February 2013, is by no means exhaustive
or complete. A conscious effort has been made to include most valuable phonetic sites by leading
phoneticians, which might be useful both for a novice and a seminar student. The reviewed phonetic
2
The only words for which Turkish learners produced significantly shorter vowels than German native speakers were
those words which did not mark vowel length in their orthography by either the so called “lengthening h” (Dehnungsh) or <ie> for /i:/ (in our experiment, this was the case for the words Glas and Fuß). Apparently, the few non-nativelike productions by Turkish GFL learners can be explained by the influence of German orthography.
36
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websites are divided into the following alphabetically listed thematic categories: accents and dialects,
blogs, dictionaries (linguistics, phonetics and phonology, online pronunciation and speech),
encyclopedias, intonation, old pronunciation, pronunciation (practical materials), phonetics (handouts
and slideshows), resources, software (free), speech archives, spelling and transcription (firstly: fonts,
symbols, sound to symbol; secondly, online English phonetic transcription tools, text to phonetics;
thirdly, online phonetic keyboards and eventually, interactive phonetic charts). ‘The others’ section
comprises information most useful for seminar students who, in the process of writing their
dissertation, should be able to make use of the concordances, national English language corpora, BA
and MA thesis style sheets and templates. For reasons of brevity, phonological websites as well as
sites on speech waveform analysis, speech synthesizers and speech recognition are not included here
(see a comprehensive discussion of the last three above-mentioned categories by Dillon, 2003).
REFERENCES
Dillon, G. L. 2003. “Resources for studying Spoken English”,http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/
PhonResources/PhonResources.html (date of access: 28 February 2013).
Sobkowiak, W. 2010. “Some useful pronunciation links”, http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/~swlodek/prnlinks.htm
(date of access: 28 February 2013).
Stasiak, S., I. C yżak. 2006. „Pr egląd asobów Internetowych do samod ielnej nauki wymowy
ję yka angielskiego c yli jak stwor yć własne mini laboratorium ję ykowe?”, W. Sobkowiak, E.
Waniek-Klimczak (eds.), Dydaktyka fonetyki języka obcego w Polsce. Referaty z szóstej konferencji
naukowej Mikorzyn, 8-10.5.2006 [Phonetics in FLT 6, Mikorzyn 8-10.5.2006]. Konin:
Wydawnictwo PWSZ, 188-202, abstract and alphabetical thematic index of phonetic websites:
http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/~swlodek/Stasiak.htm (date of access: 28 February 2013)
THE ISSUE OF POLISH VOICING – A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE
Ewa Pająk
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Crosslinguistically, the opposition between voiced and voiceless obstruents is not phonologically
interpreted in a unified fashion. For the languages with two-way contrast, two major types of systems
have been distinguished: those in which voicing is the active feature responsible for the contrast (e.g.:
Dutch, French, Russian) and those in which aspiration is regarded as active, e.g.: German, English,
Icelandic (Harris 2009, Honeybone 2005). The decision on what category a system belongs to depends
on the phonetic clues as well as on the phonological behaviour of the obstruents in this system.
The active feature may be expressed in a variety of ways, a corresponding element (L or H) being one
of them. Polish – along with other Slavic languages – falls into the former category, in which genuine
voicing, but not aspiration, is present. Therefore, in their make-up voiced obstruents are enriched with
the L element (Harris 2009).
Polish is not uniform in this respect, however, since there are sandhi phenomena suggesting that
certain dialectal areas pattern rather with H languages (Cyran 2012). Moreover, diachronic processes
that affected the language in the course of its development point to the presence of H, rather than L, in
the composition of obstruents. The change examined in the study is the Old Polish compensatory
lengthening, in which the voice value of the neighbouring consonant played a crucial role. If it was
voiced, the lengthening could take place, if voiceless – the process was blocked (Carlton 1991, Bethin
1998). It is going to be proposed, first of all, that the blocking effect of voicelessness was of
phonological nature. The phonological character is to be understood as the presence of an additional
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
element making the process of compensatory lengthening impossible to operate. The H element,
claimed to be non-existent inside the Slavic world, seems to have inhibited Polish vocalic changes in
its ancestral stages. This conclusion may shed new light on certain aspects of the development of
Polish, as well as on the evolution of systems in general.
REFERENCES
Bethin, C. (1998) Slavic Prosody. Cambridge: University Press
Carlton, T. R. (1991) Introduction to the phonological history of the Slavic languages. Columbus, OH:
Slavica
Harris, J. (2009) Why final devoicing is weakening. In K. Nasukava and P. Backley (eds.), Strength
Relations in Phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Honeybone, P. (2005) Diachronic evidence in segmental phonology: the case of obstruents laryngeal
specifications. In M. van Oostendorp et al. (eds.), The Internal Organization of Phonological
Segments. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Cyran E. (2012) Cracov voicing is neither phonological nor phonetic. It is both phonological and
phonetic. In E. Cyran, H. Kardela and B. Szymanek (eds.), Sound, Structure and Sense. Studies in
Memory of Edmund Gussmann. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL
ADAPTATION OF POLISH CC CONSONANT CLUSTERS BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH
Marek Radomski
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland
In the course of borrowing, foreign words containing consonant clusters which are ill-formed in the
target language undergo various modifications so as to fit the recipient language phonological system.
The most frequent repair strategies used to bring loanwords into conformity with the target language
phonotactics are vowel epenthesis, consonant deletion or change of an illegal cluster into a different
one. The choice of an adaptation strategy may depend on a range of factors, including the position of a
cluster in a word, the channel of adaptation, the structure of a cluster etc. For instance, the loanword
phonology literature devoted to phonotactic adaptations (e.g. Kang 2011) suggests that there is a crosslinguistic preference for epenthesis as a repair strategy for consonant clusters in word-initial position.
This finding is in accordance with Paradis and LaCharite’s (1997) Preservation Principle, which
stipulates that as much phonological information in the input as possible should be preserved unless
the cost of preservation is too high. As for the adaptation of clusters in word-final position, it is
difficult to establish which repair strategy is cross-linguistically preferred since there is a considerable
variability in applied strategies.
In this paper we report on an online loanword adaptation experiment in which 30 native speakers of
British English adapted two sets of Polish words containing CC consonant clusters which do not occur
in English. The experimental stimuli were presented in both oral and written forms in order to
determine the influence of the channel of adaptation on the choice of a repair strategy. More
specifically, we aim to provide answers to the following research questions:



Which repair strategy is predominantly applied to Polish CC consonant clusters (epenthesis,
deletion or segment change)?
Does the position of a cluster in a word (word-initial vs. word-final) influence the choice of a
repair strategy?
Does the choice of a repair strategy depend on the structure of a cluster?
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
Do the patterns of adaptation revealed in the experiment follow cross-linguistic tendencies of
consonant cluster adaptation?
REFERENCES
Kang, Y. (2011) Loanword phonology. In Van Oostendorp, M., Ewen, C. J., Hume, E. & K. Rice
(eds.) Companion to phonology. Oxford: Blackwell. 2258-2282.
Paradis, C. & D. LaCharité (1997) Preservation and minimality in loanword adaptation. Journal of
Linguistics 33. 379-430.
ACOUSTIC FEATURES OF NASAL GEMINATES IN POLISH
Arkadiusz Rojczyk & Andrzej Porzuczek
University of Silesia, Poland
Polish is characterized for a distinction between singleton and geminate consonants. They can be both
within-morphemic and derived through morphological processes. They occur mostly in intervocalic
positions. The current study focuses on nasal geminates. Words such as ‘pana’ - ‘panna’ or ‘rana’ –
‘ranna’ are distinguished by a singleton nasal in the first word and a nasal geminate sequence in the
second word. Since this contrast is phonemic, it is interesting to investigate how it is precisely signaled
acoustically. Auditory observations indicate that the acoustic features of this contrast may depend on
the speaking style and tempo. While in clear or careful speech nasal geminates may be signaled by
rearticulation of the second nasal, in that the tongue disrupts from upper teeth to initiate another nasal,
in casual speech the tongue may remain pressed against the upper teeth and a double nature of nasals
is cued by some specific acoustic parameters or a combination thereof.
Fifteen native speakers of Polish participated in the study and read words with nasal geminates in
different contexts that were expected to induce speaking modes ranging from careful to casual speech.
Acoustic analyses were made for parameters such as duration of nasal segments, duration of preceding
vowels, intensity of the nasal murmur. The results show the strategies used by native speakers of
Polish to contrast singleton and geminate nasals in production.
THE IRRELEVANCE OF PHONETICS:
WHY DO POLES FAIL TO PRODUCE POLISH SOUNDS IN FOREIGN WORDS?
Mikołaj Rychło
University of Gdańsk, Poland
The title of the paper echoes the article by Gussmann (2004) which addresses the role of phonetics in
phonology, and in particular the significance or relevance of phonetic explanation in phonology. The
argumentation in that paper comes from the Polish palatalisation of velars, and the failure of
palatalisation in spite of the phonetic factors. The present paper discusses a different problem which
seems to lead to similar conclusions, namely that phonetic systems are phonologically motivated. The
research problem is how to explain why Polish learners of foreign languages find it difficult to
pronounce sounds such as the voiceless palatal fricative [ç] present in German ich, brechen, Bücher.
This difficulty is particularly remarkable and surprising in view of the fact that native speakers of
Polish do produce the voiceless palatal fricative on an every-day basis in words such as historia,
machina, wysłuchiwać. The presence of this sound in the Polish language seems to undermine the
phonetic basis of the difficulty as the Polish students are not incapable of producing the sound as such.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
Instead, the reasons for the problem seem to be phonological rather than phonetic because there are a
number of facts concerning the organization and functioning of the sound system which reveal the
causes of the phenomenon. Consequently, the problem under investigation may serve as an argument
in the debate on the role of phonetics in phonology.
THE PHONOLOGY OF CV TRANSITIONS
Geoff Schwartz & Grzegorz Aperliński
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Phonetic research has firmly established the role of CV transitions in consonant identification. The
initial portion of vowels has been found to provide cues to the perception of place, manner, and
laryngeal specifications. In the literature on place perception (e.g. Wright et al. 1997), one may find a
characteri ation of CV formant patterns as ‘external’ cues. Such cues are claimed to contrast with
‘internal’ acoustic information, such as stop release bursts and frication noise. Consequently,
phoneticians often refer to two distinct types of perceptual cues.
This dichotomy may be interpreted as a claim that stop release and frication should be contained in
phonological representations, but formant transitions should not. Accepting such a claim would leave
us with no way to predict the relative perceptual weight of internal and transitional cues across
languages. Findings such as those of Hume et al. (1999), by which American and Korean listeners
weighted bursts and transitions differently, would have to attributed to language specific rules of
‘phonetic implementation’. Yet since L1 phonology influences perception (e.g. Best 1995), differences
in language-specific perceptual data should be reflected in the phonologies of the languages involved.
A phonological approach to CV transitions would establish parameters to describe the relative weight
of CV transitions across languages. In a language where formant transitions are built in to consonant
representations, these cues should be more acoustically robust and carry greater perceptual weight. In
addition, consonant lenition should be permissible in such languages, since the consonant is
identifiable on the basis of vowel-based formant patters. This situation may be posited for English.
This paper will compare CV transitions in English with those of Polish, a language in which consonant
lenition is largely absent. An acoustic study of parallel CVC sequences in the two languages found
that CV transitions occupy a larger percentage of overall vowel durations in English than they do in
Polish. A perceptual study is underway to test the hypothesis that Polish speakers place less weight on
CV transitions than English speakers.
The representation of CV transitions may be implemented in the non-linear environment of the Onset
Prominence framework (OP; e.g. Schwartz 2013). The crucial parameter concerns the status of the
Vocalic Onset (VO) node, a point of overlap between higher-level obstruents and lower-level vowels.
The incorporation of VO into obstruent representations is associated with greater weight of CV
transitions.
REFERENCES
Best, C. T. (1995). A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception: New Directions in
Research and Theory. In Winifred Strange (ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience:
Theoretical and methodological issues. Baltimore: York Press. pp. 171–204.
Hume, E., K. Johnson, M. Seo & G. Tserdanelis. (1999). A cross-linguistic study of stop place
perception. Proceedings of the 14th ICPhS, San Francisco. 2069-2071.
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APAP 2013
Schwartz, Geoffrey. (2013). A representational parameter for onsetless syllables. Journal of
Linguistics, Available on CJO 2013 doi:10.1017/S0022226712000436.
Wright, R., S. Frisch, and D. Pisoni. (1997). Speech Perception. Research on Spoken Language
Processing, Progress Report No. 21. Indiana University.
CAN THE PRESENCE OF CASUAL SPEECH REDUCTIONS IN L1 AID PERCEPTION OF SPOKEN L2?
Linda Shockey*, Zinny Bond** & Małgorzata Ćavar***
*University of Reading, UK **Ohio University, USA ***Eastern Michigan University, USA
This is part of ongoing research into the perception of casually-spoken English by native speakers of
other languages. A previous study has suggested that native speakers of Polish are better at
understanding a gated English sentence containing several casual speech reductions than native
speakers of Greek. It was postulated that the advantage shown by Poles could be caused by their
familiarity with complex consonant clusters. Further it was predicted that, in line with principles of
Natural Phonology, Polish would, like English, exhibit simplification of these clusters. Analysis of
several minutes of casual Polish shows that reductions both similar and dissimilar to those found in
English occur. This points to the conclusion that the facility to parse underspecified sequences is a
part of their native perceptual strategy whereas speakers of Greek have to develop this facility, since
Greek allows little complexity, especially in syllable-final position.
Armed with this theory, we looked at casual speech in Latvian, another language with a potential for
complex syllables. Our hypothesis was that it would follow English and Polish in showing predictable
casual speech “shortcuts”. In fact, some were found, but principally associated with unstressed vowel
deletion rather than with simplification of clusters. Further analysis showed that the potential for
heavy syllables was infrequently exploited, i.e. the conditions under which simplification could take
place were rare. We are currently investigating perception of casual English by speakers of Latvian so
as to allow for comparison with other groups.
PHONETIC ACCOMMODATION IN AN EFL CLASSROOM SETTING - THE CASE OF NS TEACHERS
Piotr Steinbrich
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Accommodation theory focuses on the interactive nature of communication and sees the negotiative
aspect of interaction as pivotal. Phonetic accommodation is a process whereby speakers modify certain
features of their speech to index and achieve solidarity with a co-conversationalist. The following
paper reports on a study into British native-speaker (NS) EFL teachers’ tendencies of adjusting the
manner in which they use their native pronunciation in the classroom context so as to converge
towards the speech of the learners. The study aims to investigate whether there exist significant
differences in the production of certain sounds in the classroom context (C1) and speakers’ natural
setting (C2). Recordings of seven experienced NS EFL teachers representing different regional
varieties of BE were used in the experiment. Statistical tests and psychometric measures were used to
isolate those features which are different across varieties. Frequency response curves were calculated
using the PRAAT software. F1 and F2 were compared when pronounced in C1 and C2 by each
speaker. It will be argued that British NS EFL teachers adjust their pronunciation according to the type
of context in which communication takes place. It will also be hypothesized that the sounds which are
proved to be different across speakers tend to be accommodated in such a way that their acoustic
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
properties exhibit no significant differences, thus representing a standardized variety of English. The
analysis concludes with the interviews with study participants in which their awareness of classroombased phonetic accommodation is gauged.
SPEECH ERRORS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF MACROPHONOLOGY
William J. Sullivan* & Sarah Tsiang**
*Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland **Eastern Kentucky University, USA
The terms phonology and phonetics have been applied to many different disciplines, all more or less
related to the sound system of language. In our work we are restricting the term phonetics to the
disciplines known collectively as instrumental phonetics (articulation, acoustics, and audition). We
then adopt the term macrophonology to refer to that part of the human linguistic system that relates
morphology to instrumental phonetics. The operation of macrophonology must account for the
phonetic output from and input to the human linguistic system as well as its operation up to the level
of morphology (cf. Lamb 1999).
Extensive phonological description in neurocognitive stratificational theory (e.g. Lockwood
1969, Sullivan 1998) shows the utility of two strata in the space between morphology and phonetics,
phonology proper and hypophonology. Phonology proper takes input from morphology, establishes
productive morphophonemics in the context of phonemic contrasts and archiphonemes of
neutralization, and relates them all to syllable structure. Hypophonology takes phonemic feature input
from phonology proper during encoding, provides determined phonetic features and non-contrastive
relations like assimilation, sending hypophonemic features as output signals from the linguistic system
to the motor cortex. Thus the phonemic stratum has functional relations to morphology and formal
output relations to hypophonology. The hypophonemic stratum has functional relations to the
phonemic stratum and formal output relations to the motor cortex. Each has its own syntax, i.e. a
phonotactics and a hypophonotactics.
But utility is not proof of existence. During the past two years we have been gathering speech
or performance errors, defined loosely as anything that seems in some way anomalous but is still
consistent with an individual’s linguistic system (cf. Sullivan 2011, Sullivan & Tsiang in press, Tsiang
& Sullivan in press). We analyze three major types: phonological and hypophonological timing errors
(anticipation, perseveration, spoonerisms), structural errors (e.g. in syllable structure or in
hypophonemic feature combinations), and unintended blends from both Polish and English. We show
that they support the macrophonological architecture outlined, expanding on the findings in Fromkin
1973 and Dell 1986.
REFERENCES
Dell, Gary S. 1986. A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological
review 93(3):283-321.
Fromkin, Victoria A. (ed.) 1973. Speech errors as linguistic evidence. The Hague: Mouton.
Lamb, Sydney M. 1999. Pathways of the brain. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lockwood, David G. 1969. Markedness in stratificational phonology. Language 45:300-308.
Sullivan, William J. 1998. Underspecification and feature geometry: Theorems of a reticular theory
of language. LACUS forum XXIV:53-65.
---. 2011. Input, output, and (de)linearization: What we owe to Sydney M. Lamb. LACUS forum
XXXVI:279-89.
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---, & Sarah Tsiang. In press. Tactic pattern errors and the architecture of stratificational theory. To
appear in LACUS forum XXXVII.
Tsiang, Sarah, & William J. Sullivan. In press. Unintended blends and the stratification of language.
To appear in LACUS forum XXXVIII.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE UNMARKED IN LOANWORD PHONOLOGY: HARMONIC SERIALISM
ACCOUNT
Nasir Abbas Rizvi Syed* & Sultan Melfi Aldaihani**
*Lasbela University Balochistan, Pakistan **University of Essex, UK
McCarthy & Prince (1993) pointed out that the emergence of the unmarked is operative in world
languages. Broselow et. al (1998) reported that interlanguage grammars of adult L2 learners also adopt
the unmarked option although the specific unmarked phenomenon does not exist in L1 and L2 of
learners. The current study reports on such phenomenon in loanword phonology of Arabic words in
Saraiki, a Pakistani language of Indo-Aryan family (Shackle, 1976). Saraiki does not have emphatic
consonants. Therefore the complex emphatic consonants in Arabic loanwords are substituted with the
corresponding simplex non-emphatic Saraiki consonants. The loanword adaptation of Arabic words in
Saraiki also provides evidence for the emergence of the unmarked. Two such examples are changing
CVCC mono-syllablic words of Arabic into CVC.CVC bisyllablic words in Saraiki and harmony in
the epenthetic vowels in loanwords.
In Saraiki, cluster of consonants on coda position is legitimate if the first C of the cluster is a coronal
and the second is [r]. The examples are Saraiki words ‘gadr, sitr, watr’ etc. Thus *CC-COR+r is low
ranked in Saraiki grammar. But it becomes functional in adaptation of Arabic loanwords with CC
clusters in coda position, and as repair strategy, a vowel is inserted to break the CC coda cluster. The
examples are Arabic words like 'badr’ which changes into ‘bad.dar’ in Saraiki.
In addition, vowel harmony is also maintained in the loanwords. In indigenous Saraiki vocabulary, any
combinations of available vowels are legitimate and words of the structures ‘CV(a,i,u)C.CV(a,i,u)C’
exist in the language. The examples are Saraiki words ‘bulla, kulli, pitta, kalli, kinnu' in which any
two types of vowels may occur together in adjacent syllables of a word. In Arabic loanwords of
similar CC clusters on coda position, Saraiki inserts a vowel to break the cluster and geminates the
adjacent consonant to satisfy some prosodic constraints. In this context, the epenthetic vowel is
harmonious to the vowel in the original Arabic word. The examples are adaptation of Arabic words
‘fikr, kufr, badr’ into ‘fik.kir’ 'kuf.fur' and ‘bad.dar’ respectively in Saraiki.
These phenomena will be presented using Harmonic Serialism in Optimality Theory (McCarthy, 2000,
2010) because there are multiple changes occurring in the loanword adaptation process which
Harmonic Serialism can capture in a better way. The selection of this version of OT is to explain
conflicts between different constraints of the L1, L2 and loanword grammar and also to determine
final ranking.
REFERENCES
Broselow, E., Chen, S. & Wang, C. (1998). The emergence of the unmarked in second language
phonology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20, 261-80.
McCarthy, J. & Prince, A. (1993). The emergence of the unmarked: Optimality in prosodic
morphology. Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 24, 333-379.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
McCarthy, J. (2000). Harmonic serialism and parallelism. Proceedings of the North East Linguistics
Society 30. Masako Hirotani, 501-524. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications. (Available on Rutgers
Optimality Archive ROA-357)
McCarthy, J. (2010). An introduction to Harmonic Serialism. Language and Linguistics Compas 4/10,
1001-1018.
Shackle, C. (1976). The Siraiki Language of Central Pakistan. London: SOAS. London University.
CONTROVERSIES IN CURRENT ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION PEDAGOGY PERENNIAL PROBLEMS, REALISTIC AND UNREALISTIC SOLUTIONS
Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland
Due to the considerable impact of the concept of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and its
pronunciation teaching agenda, known as the Lingua Franca Core (Jenkins 2000), the last decade has
witnessed a major change of paradigms in pronunciation teaching. As a result, as argued by Levis
(2005), pronunciation theory, research and practice are in transition and many widely accepted
assumptions such as the supremacy of inner-circle models, the primacy of suprasegmentals and the
need for native instructors have been challenged.
While most specialists agree that, in view of these facts, some modifications in English pronunciation
instruction are unavoidable, it is by no means clear what they should be like in specific cases. Thus,
although much attention has been given to pronunciation teaching to ESL learners (e.g. Celce-Murcia
et al. 2010), as well as to ELF students (e.g. Walker 2011), an important and highly controversial issue
concerns selecting appropriate phonetic model(s) and pronunciation priorities for the largest group of
learners, from the expanding circle, for whom English is a foreign language (EFL) and whose number
is often estimated to be around 1.5 billion. The debate over this problem has been very heated (e.g.
Dziubalska-Kołac yk & Pr edlacka 2005) and is far from being settled, with many opposing views
being expressed and different arguments being presented.
The present paper is meant as a contribution to this discussion. It addresses the major theoretical
controversies relevant to contemporary English phonodidactics approached from an EFL perspective.
More specifically, we deal with the issue of an appropriate pronunciation model for foreign learners
and consider the feasibility of several artificially created and native phonetic models, address the
question of a principled choice of a natural variety of English which can serve this function, and
examine some consequences of regarding pronunciation teaching/learning in EFL and ESL contexts as
a single phenomenon characterized by a set of similar properties.
REFERENCES
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. & J. Goodwin. 2010. Teaching Pronunciation: a Reference for
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: CUP
Levis, J. 2005. Changing contexts and shifting paradigms in pronunciation teaching. TESOL
Quarterly, 39 (3), 369-78.
Dziubalska-Kołac yk K. & J. Pr edlacka (eds). 2005. English Pronunciation Models: A Changing
Scene. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Walker, R. 2010. Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: OUP
session on phonetics and phonology In ELT
Special
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ON THE TEACHABILITY OF ENGLISH ALLOPHONIC DISTINCTIONS TO INTERMEDIATE POLISH
LEARNERS
Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska*, Sławomir Stasiak**, Radosław Święciński*
* Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland ** LO im. KEN w Stalowej Woli, Poland
While in English pronunciation instruction phonemic contrasts have always occupied a central
position, views on the importance of teaching allophony vary. When native models of pronunciation
are adopted for foreign learners, the major allophonic distinctions are supposed to be taught to them
(Cruttenden 2008). According to Jenkins (2000) and her English as a Lingua Franca approach, only
two allophonic phenomena, i.e. aspiration and Pre-Fortis Clipping are claimed to be of crucial
importance for achieving intelligible English speech in international contexts and are regarded by her
as top pronunciation priorities. Another issue concerns the teachability/learnability of allophony, with
a common assumption that if some distinctions between sounds are irrelevant for intelligibility and are
unteachable, they should not be part of foreign learners’ phonetic training.
The present study examines the teachability of selected English allophonic distinctions, which are
absent in Polish, to intermediate Polish learners. They include the following:
1. Aspiration of /p, t, k/ (e.g. in pen, teach, come)
2. Pre-Fortis Clipping (e.g. bat vs bad, cart vs card).
3. Distinction between dark and clear ‘l’ (e.g. look – cool, lip – pill)
4. Syllabic consonants (e.g. sudden, button, little, middle).
5. No audible release in stop clusters (e.g. rugby, actor, football)
The paper is a report on an experiment in which 10 secondary school learners of English for four
months were trained in the pronunciation of the five allophonic phenomena listed above with the view
to finding answers to the following questions:


Which of the five allophonic distinctions, as measured by pre-test and post-test results, are the
easiest and which are the most difficult to acquire in terms of
a. progress made by the participants in the realization of the sounds
b. their success rate in mastering particular allophones;
Which changes in the learners’ pronunciation are durable and which are not, as measured by
the comparison of post-test and delayed post-test results?
REFERENCES
Cruttenden, A. 2008. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. 7th edition. London: Hodder Education
Jenkins, J. 2000. The Phonology of English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
PHONETIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PALATAL GLIDE IN POLISH AND THEIR
PHONOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS.
Radosław Święciński
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland
Palatalization processes, which belong to the central issues of Polish phonology, have been
approached from a variety of theoretical perspectives and described in numerous studies, e.g.
Laskowski (1975), Gussmann (1978, 1980, 1992, 2007), Rubach (1984, 2003), Czaykowska-Higgins
(1988), Bethin (1992), Szpyra (1995), to name just the major contributions. Yet, in spite of these
analyses, there remain many important aspects of the phenomenon in question which are controversial
and unclear.
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
The principal aim of this paper is to shed light on an important as well as controversial aspect of
palatalization in Polish, namely the presence or absence of the palatal glide in the phonological
representation of words that on the surface contain sequences of a palatalized plosive and [j], such as
[pjj]óro ‘feather’, [djj]abeł ‘devil’ or [cj]edy ‘when.’ The presented analysis employs spectrogram and
waveform based measurements of segmental duration and voice onset time (VOT), all widely accepted
methods in Laboratory Phonology, and provides an insight into the matter in question through
exploring experimentally the phonetics-phonology interface.
The analysis of acoustic measurements of C(j)jV and CV sequences provides support for the claim that
there is a /j/ segment in the phonological representations of the sequences under investigation and
shows that the length of transitory segments after palatalized obstruents is in the majority of cases
longer than that of the following vowels.
THE ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF /l/-VOCALIZATION IN AYRSHIRE SCOTTISH ENGLISH
Mateusz Urban* & Sławomir Zdziebko**
*Jagiellonian University, Poland **John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
The process of /l/-vocalisation has been extensively studied from the socio-phonetic and articulatoryphonological point of view (see Stuart-Smith et al. 2006, Johnson and Britain 2007, Laurel 2008). Our
aim is to propose an acoustic study of /l/-vocalisation in Ayrshire Scottish English (ASE) based on the
difference between formant frequencies of vowels adjacent to vocalised and non-vocalised laterals. In
accordance with Element Theory (see Kaye, Lowenstamm and Vergnaud 1990, Backley 2011), we
will analyse the vocalic system of ASE as consisting of combinations of three elements (I, U and A),
whose acoustic correlates are as follows: I – high F1 and/or high F2; U – low F1 and/or F2; A – high F1
and/or low F2.
We will present the results of measurements of vowel formants and vowel length in 8 ASE speakers.
These results will be used to posit representations of ASE stressed monophthongs. Based on these
representations and the differences in formant frequencies we will suggest representations of nonvocalised and vocalised variants of /l/, i.e. [ɫ] = {I.U} and [w] = {U} respectively. The details of the
method are exemplified below based on the speech of the speaker syacc1 from the PAC corpus of
Ayrshire SE (see Pukli 2006).
The formant frequencies for the laterals and the vowel /ɛ/ = {I.A} are measured in two lexical items
little /ɫɛtw/ and fill /fɛw/. The obtained frequencies of F1 and F2 are subtracted according to the
formula FXv − FXl, whereby the frequency of an appropriate formant of the lateral is subtracted from
the frequency of the appropriate formant of a vowel. The exact results for this vowel and speaker are:
F1[ɛ] − F1[ɫ] = 201Hz, F2[ɛ] − F2[ɫ] = 254Hz and F1[ɛ] − F1[w] = 198Hz, F2[ɛ] − F2[w] = 426Hz.
The 200Hz difference between the F1 of the vowel and F1 of the laterals is attributed to the presence of
A (responsible for high F1) in the vowel and its absence in the two variants of the lateral. The
difference between the frequency of F2 in the two variants of the lateral is explained by the presence of
I in [ɫ] and its absence in [w]. The 250Hz difference between the F2 of the vowel and the F2 of [ɫ]
results from the fact that in the latter A (responsible for low F2) is in a symmetrical relation with I,
whereas in the former U (responsible for low F2) heads the expression.
REFERENCES
Backley, P. (2011) An Introduction to Element Theory. Edinburgh University Press.
Johnson, W. and D. Britain (2007) L-vocalisation as a natural phenomenon: explorations in
sociophonology. Language Sciences 27, 294-315.
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Kaye, J., J. Lowenstamm and J.-R.Vergnaud, (1990): Constituent structure and government in
phonology. Phonology Yearbook 7, 193-231.
Laurel, C. (2008) Poor Paul: L Vocalisation and the Process of Syllable-Coda Weakening. Peter Lang.
Pukli, M. (2006) Investigation sociophonétique de l’anglais en Ecosse : le cas de Ayr. Unpublished
Ph.D. Dissertation, Universite Toulouse II – Le Mirail.
Stuart-Smith, J., C. Timmins and F. Tweedie (2006) Conservation and innovation in traditional
dialect. L-vocalization in Glaswegian. English World-Wide 27:1, 71-87.
PHONETIC INTERFERENCE AS A SOCIOCULTURAL PHENOMENON
Olga Valigura
Kyiv National Linguistic University, Ukraine
This research presents a sociocultural approach to the analysis of phonetic interference in the English
speech of Ukrainian native speakers.
The phonetic interference in the research is viewed as a result of the interaction of the phonetic
systems and pronunciation norms of two languages in the consciousness of a speaker. It manifests
itself in the violations of the phonetic inventory and the prosodic arrangement of a bilingual’s nonnative speech as well as deviations of its semantics. We regard the phonetic interference to be a
complex cognitive and communicative phenomenon pertinent to a bilingual’s mentality and speech as
a combination of phonetic features, the manifestation degree of which depends on mental,
psychological, social and cultural factors.
The phonetic issues, discussed in the research, are results of the experimental study of phonetic
interference in the English speech of Ukrainian native speakers. Typical violations of the accented
phonetic system of English speech generated by Ukrainians on both segmental and suprasegmental
levels are determined via the comparative analysis of the English pronunciation standard and the
Ukrainians’ English speech. Peculiarities of national and individual character in the pronunciation
accent developed by the Ukrainian speakers of English are established. Having taken into
consideration such sociocultural factors as social status and social role of the speakers, natural or
artificial conditions of English as a foreign language learning, time of language contacts, the level of
the pronunciation culture and the linguistic worldview of the speakers, the level of their phonological
and sociocultural competence etc., varieties and degrees of phonetic interference in Ukrainians’
English speech are revealed.
CROSS-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCE IN SECOND VS. THIRD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF PHONOLOGY
Magdalena Wrembel
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in second language acquisition research has been perceived to be of a
one-to-one type between the source and the target language. Third language acquisition, however,
posits a combined CLI that involves simultaneous influence of more than one previously acquired
languages on the target language (de Angelis 2007). This perspective allows for non-native languages
of the multilingual learners to be investigated as potential sources of CLI in addition to the widely
attested transfer from the L1 (e.g., Ringbom, 1987). The present contribution aims to discuss major
results of three series of studies on cross-linguistic influence in L3 phonological acquisition conducted
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APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS
by the author, including foreign accent ratings, VOT acquisition patterns, and oral awareness protocols
in order to draw some comparisons with parallel studies in SLA.
Foreign accent ratings have been widely applied in SLA studies (e.g., Flege 1988; Piske, McKay &
Flege 2001) yet they have not been used in research on third language phonological acquisition with
the exception of Hammarberg and Hammarberg’s case study (2005). A series of accent ratings on L3
English, L3 French and L3 Polish administered by the author (e.g., Wrembel 2012), aimed to
determine the roles played by the native vs. non-native languages in contributing to foreign
accentedness in L3 performance. The present discussion is intended to compare the correlation
patterns between perceived foreign accent, intelligibility, acceptability and confidence level to the
ones observed in the SLA literature.
The second series of studies aimed to investigate sources and directions of cross-linguistic influence
(CLI) in the acquisition of VOT in L3 English, L3 French and L3 Polish (e.g. Wrembel 2011). The
observed L3 values corresponded to intermediate L1 and L2 mean VOT. These compromise VOT
values provide evidence for the co-existence of the L1 and L2 interference, thus substantiating the
assumption of a combined CLI in L3 acquisition. The category assimilation observed in the
acquisition of L3 VOT seems to be of a different nature than the one reported in the SLA literature
(e.g., Flege 1987) where we tend to have a hybrid between the native and target values.
The third series of studies involving oral protocols have added an extra dimension to the
understanding of metalinguistic awareness in multilingual learners (cf. Jessner 2006). The
introspective analysis of self-observations and meta-comments reflected the participants’ crosslinguistic phonological awareness of the existing interactions between their language systems.
Finally, an attempt will be made to interpret the results of the aforementioned L3 studies so as to
provide some pedagogical implications for teaching foreign language pronunciation in a multilingual
setting.
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