Laboratory Phonology 11
89
Maddieson
Segmentation, not just similarity: alliteration as a natural experiment
Ian Maddieson
Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico; [email protected]
Various forms of verbal art and verbal play provide illuminating evidence as to how speakers analyze the
internal structure of words. For example, the use of end-rhyme is common in slogans, song lyrics and poetry
in English (and a good number of other languages), as in (1)
(1)
Chantilly lace and a pretty face
an’ a pony tail a-hangin’ down.
A wiggle an’ a walk,
a giggle an’ a talk
make the world go roun’. (J. P. Richardson “The Big Bopper”, 1958)
Such data demonstrate that speakers make a division corresponding to the cut that linguists propose between
the onset and rhyme of a syllable. Speakers are also aware of the location of stress, since all parts of the
rhyming words after the onset of the stressed syllable must be identical for a true rhyme: ‘funny’ and
‘money’ rhyme with each other later in this text, but would not rhyme with ‘knee’.
A different cut is demonstrated by the patterns of alliteration in verse and forms of ritual speech in early
Germanic. These patterns provide strong prima facie evidence that speakers can be sensitive to the segment
as a unit organizing their knowledge of the sound structure of their language. In essence the alliterative
convention is as follows: one or two of the onsets of stressed syllables must begin with the same segment in
two successive phrases (that is, poetic half-lines which generally contain two stresses), but not more than
three onsets may alliterate in the line. Crucially, in the case of onsets containing clusters (except for */sp, st,
sk/), only the first consonant is relevant. Early Germanic languages had a number of bisegmental onset
clusters that have been simplified in some or all of the surviving languages, including */hw, hl, hr, hn, kn,
wr, wl/ , in addition to many that have survived as clusters, such as */pr, pl, tr, kr, br, bl, dr, gr, gl, tw, dw,
sw, sm, sn/ and so on. The initial consonant of all these bisegmental clusters alliterates with a matching
single C onset (see 2, 3 below). Thus the identity of a single segment guides the pattern; the onset as a whole
is not required to be identical, and the cut does not fall at the onset-rhyme boundary.
th
Although the most extensive data comes from manuscripts in Latin script from the 9 century C.E. or
later, the tradition is not a convention based on literacy (Minkova, 2003; Lapidge, 1979). Early examples
from Runic inscriptions testify to its antiquity. These include the inscription on the (now destroyed) shorter
Golden Horn of Gallehus (Common Norse, 4th or 5th century C.E.) in (2) and the inscription on the front
panel of the Franks Casket (Old English, early 7th century C.E.) in (3). Transcribed from the original runes
into more familiar letters these read (with possible translations):
(2)
(3)
ek hlewagastiz holtijaz / horna tawido
“I, the ?honored-guest, Holti's son, made this horn”
fisc flodu / ahof on fergenberig
“the flood threw the fish onto the ?fir-mountain,
warþ gasric grorn / þær he on greut giswom the ghost-king was sad as he beached himself on the gravel”
In (2) the cluster /hl/ in ‘hlewagastiz’ alliterates with simple /h/ in ‘holtijaz’ and ‘horna’. In (3) the cluster /fl/
in ‘flodu’ alliterates with simple /f/ in ‘fisc’ and ‘fergenberig’, and the cluster /gr/ in ‘grorn’ and 'greut'
alliterates with simple /g/ in ‘gasric’ (though not with the ‘g’ in ‘giswom’ which is in an unstressed
inflectional syllable).
The fact that this tradition provides support for the operational reality of a segment-sized unit seems to
have attracted relatively little attention in the linguistic literature (or even for historical reconstruction of
English prior to Minkova, 2003). This is in marked contrast to the substantial attention paid to two ‘quirks’
of the system — that clusters /sp, st, sk/ alliterate only with themselves but neither with simple /s/ nor other
/s/-initial clusters, and that any vowel-initial word alliterates with any other vowel-initial word. The latter is
probably because these words in fact regularly began with an unwritten glottal stop (Rapp, 1836; Minkova,
2003). The former remains potentially a challenge to the notion that segmentation is an explanatory account
of the alliterative traditions.
One alternative was proposed by Fleischhacker (2000). In an experiment inspired in part by the patterns
in the early Germanic alliterative tradition, she sought pairwise similarity ratings from speakers of modern
American English. The subjects assigned similarity scores on a 7-point scale to rhyming word/non-word
pairs such as [bleim]/[breim] (Cl/Cr), [bleim]/[beim] (Cl/C) or [breim]/[beim] (Cr/C). No significant
difference was found between these three types of comparisons. That is, forms with an onset cluster
containing a liquid were found to be perceptually equidistant both from each other and from a singleton
LabPhon11 abstracts
edited by Paul Warren
Wellington, New Zealand
30 June - 2 July 2008
Abstract accepted after review
90
Maddieson
Laboratory Phonology 11
onset. Fleischhacker therefore suggests that a generalized notion of degree of perceptual similarity can
account for the acceptability of series such as /bl, br, b/ as good alliterating sets without appealing to
segmentation (and presumably the same for sets such as /hr, hw, h/ and /kw, kn, k/), while /sp, st, sk/ are
rejected as being too perceptually dissimilar.
A more elaborate version of this experiment is being run to see if the results are reproducible, to test the
effects of task design on the results obtained, and to incorporate a wider range of onset types in the
comparisons. Subjects are asked to perform two tasks. In one they provide similarity ratings of pairs of
rhyming words using a 7-point scale, along the general lines of Fleischhacker’s experiment. All pairs consist
of either two real words of English or two nonsense words (e.g. ‘fog/frog’ or ‘krig/kig’), rather than being
word/non-word pairs. In the other task they judge which two out of a triplet of rhyming real (e.g.
‘fog/frog/flog’) or nonsense words (e.g. ‘kig/krig/klig’) are more similar to each other. The judgments from
each task are obtained in two alternative ways labeled here ‘written’ and ‘oral’. In the written presentation
subjects read the words on a printed sheet and respond either by circling a number on the 7-point scale for
the pairs task or by circling the two most similar words in the triplets task. In the oral presentation subjects
are played a recorded voice speaking the pair or triplet of words to be judged (with a standardized falling
pitch contour) and verbally report their judgment to the experimenter. Subjects perform a written task first,
and an oral task second. Subjects who do the pairs task in written form do the triplets task orally, and viceversa. Pilot results from 16 subjects have been analyzed to date, giving eight subjects in each
task/presentation subset. Final reports aim to cover at least 40 subjects.
With respect to the pairwise comparison between singletons and obstruent+liquid clusters in the
aggregated scores across subjects and presentations, Fleischhacker’s result is approximately reproduced
when raw rating scores are used. Cl/Cr pairs receive slightly higher ratings globally than C/Cr or C/Cl pairs,
but the difference in ratings between these types of pairs does not reach a minimal level of significance (p <
.06) in an analysis of variance. However, subjects vary considerably in the range of values on the scale which
they use in reporting their comparisons, resulting in high inter-subject variance unrelated to the measurement
of relative similarity. The effect of these differences can be removed by calculating the deviations from each
individual subject’s mean rating. When deviation scores are analyzed the main effect of pair type reaches the
.01 level of significance. Cl/Cr pairs are rated as significantly more similar than pairs containing C/Cr or
C/Cl. A difference also clearly emerges from the triplets task. In the triplets containing C/Cl/Cr onsets the
Cl/Cr pairing is very strongly preferred as representing the two more closely similar words (66% of
responses, against 33% chance). Neither the difference between real and nonsense words nor between written
versus oral presentation has any consistent overall effect (though written vs oral presentation is confounded
with subject differences, which can be quite marked). Taken together these results strongly suggest that
C/Cl/Cr onsets are not all equally perceptually similar, as Fleischhacker had suggested. Rather, Cl and Cr
onsets are more similar to each other than to singleton C onsets. If this intuition can be projected back to
early Germanic times, then the alliterative patterns in early verse cannot be accounted for by onset-level
similarity as this would suggest that a preference for Cl/Cr alliterative pairings over C/Cr or C/Cl should be
found. Another factor must be in play. The obvious candidate is that similarity for the purposes of alliteration
is only computed over the first segment of an onset for the majority of onsets.
The experiment also includes comparison of singleton /s/ vs s+stop onsets (sT) among a variety of other
patterns. In the pairs test s/sT pairs are rated significantly less similar than either C/Cr (p < 0.007) or C/Cl
pairs (p < 0.003). In the triplets task comparing s/sT/T onsets (e.g. ‘seam, steam, team’) the sT/T pair is
judged most similar (60% of responses). This suggests that for modern English speakers the stop is the most
salient element in the complex sT onset. If this intuition can also be projected back, it may help to account
for why singleton /s/ onsets were not paired with sT clusters in the alliterative tradition. Alliterating /sp, st,
sk/ only with themselves maintains the identity requirement on the initial segment and at the same time
respects the primary salience of the stop element in these clusters.
References
Fleischhacker, H. (2000). The location of epenthetic vowels with respect to consonant clusters: an auditory similarity
account. M.A. thesis. University of California, Los Angeles.
Lapidge, M. (1979). Aldhelm’s Latin poetry and Old English verse. Comparative Literature, 31, 209-231.
Minkova, D. (2003). Alliteration and sound change in early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Rapp, K. M. (1836). Versuch einer Physiologie der Sprache nebst historischer Entwickelung der abendländischen
Idiome nach physiologischen Grundsätzen, erster Band. Stuttgart: Cottasche Verlagsbuchhandlung.