articulator theory darin flynn university of calgary

305 Pages·2007·2.42 MB·English

ARTICULATOR

THEORY

DARIN FLYNN

DFLYNN UCALGARY.CA

UNIVERSITY
OF CALGARY

DARIN FLYNN, 2006
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................VI
INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET.........................................................VII
1. FOUNDATIONS...........................................................................................................1
1.1. PHONOLOGICAL THEORY...........................................................................................1
1.2. PHONEME INVENTORIES AND FEATURES....................................................................6
1.3. PARADIGMATIC VS. SYNTAGMATIC.........................................................................17
Exercises...............................................................................................................21
2. ARTICULATOR-FREE FEATURES......................................................................23
2.1. MAJOR CLASS FEATURES.........................................................................................23
2.1.1. [±consonantal]................................................................................................23
Assimilation/dissimilation....................................................................................33
Exercises...............................................................................................................36
2.1.2. [±sonorant].....................................................................................................37
Assimilation..........................................................................................................42
Exercise.................................................................................................................43
2.2. MANNER FEATURES................................................................................................43
2.2.1. [±lateral].........................................................................................................44
Assimilation/dissimilation....................................................................................47
Exercises...............................................................................................................50
2.2.2. [±strident].......................................................................................................52
Assimilation/dissimilation....................................................................................55
Exercises...............................................................................................................60
2.2.3. [±continuant]..................................................................................................63
Assimilation/dissimilation....................................................................................70
Exercises...............................................................................................................73
2.2.4. [±nasal]...........................................................................................................78
Assimilation/dissimilation....................................................................................83
Exercises...............................................................................................................86
3. ORAL PLACE FEATURES......................................................................................88
3.1. LIPS.........................................................................................................................88
3.1.1. [labial]............................................................................................................89
Assimilation/dissimilation....................................................................................91
Exercises...............................................................................................................94
3.1.2. [±round]..........................................................................................................96
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Assimilation/dissimilation....................................................................................99
Exercises.............................................................................................................109
3.2. TONGUE BLADE....................................................................................................110
3.2.1. [coronal].......................................................................................................110
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................113
Exercises.............................................................................................................116
3.2.2. [±anterior]....................................................................................................118
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................122
Exercises.............................................................................................................126
3.2.3. [±distributed]................................................................................................127
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................129
Exercises.............................................................................................................131
3.3. TONGUE BODY......................................................................................................133
3.3.1. [dorsal].........................................................................................................133
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................138
Exercises.............................................................................................................143
3.3.2. Other Tongue Body features.........................................................................147
Assimilation/dissimilation of [±back].................................................................152
Assimilation/dissimilation of [±high].................................................................159
Assimilation/dissimilation of [±low]..................................................................164
Exercises.............................................................................................................165
4. GUTTURAL FEATURES........................................................................................169
4.1. TONGUE ROOT......................................................................................................169
4.1.1. [radical]........................................................................................................169
4.1.2. [±ATR]..........................................................................................................172
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................174
Exercises.............................................................................................................177
4.1.3. On schwa.......................................................................................................179
Exercise...............................................................................................................184
4.2. LARYNX................................................................................................................185
4.2.1. [±voice].........................................................................................................185
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................191
Exercises.............................................................................................................197
4.2.2. [±spread glottis]...........................................................................................200
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................203
Exercises.............................................................................................................205
4.2.3. [±constricted glottis]....................................................................................208
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................214
Exercises.............................................................................................................217
4.3. TONE.....................................................................................................................224
4.3.1. [±upper register]..........................................................................................224
Assimilation/dissimilation..................................................................................235
Exercises.............................................................................................................243
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4.3.2. [±raised pitch]..............................................................................................247
Assimilation........................................................................................................253
5. CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................256
5.1. INTRASEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY............................................................................256
5.2. INTERSEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY............................................................................258
5.3. SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY IN OPTIMALITY THEORY...............................................262
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................268
INDEX............................................................................................................................298
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Acknowledgments

For their support I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my colleagues in the De-
partment of Linguistics and language departments at the University of Calgary. For co-
pious comments I thank especially David Rood and Mike Dobrovolsky. Students in my
undergraduate and graduate courses in phonology have also been a source of energy and
inspiration for me.

Of the many who have affected how I think about phonology, I wish to single out my
undergraduate phonology instructor Henrietta Hung (Brandeis), my former graduate ad-
visors Pat Shaw (UBC), Doug Pulleyblank (UBC), and Emmon Bach (UMass/SOAS),
as well as (in α order) Morris Halle (MIT), Michael Kenstowicz (MIT), John McCarthy
(UMass), Ian Maddieson (Berkeley), Joe Pater (UMass), Lisa Selkirk (UMass), Donca
Steriade (MIT), and Bert Vaux (Harvard).

Of course none of those just mentioned are to be held responsible for erroneousnesses
below.
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International Phonetic Alphabet

© International Phonetic Association
FOUNDATIONS 1
1. FOUNDATIONS* A game of chess is like an ar-
tificial realization of what

language offers in a natural
1.1. Phonological theory
form.

−Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916
Phonology [fəˈnɑləʤi] is the study of sound
Course in General Linguistics (I:3)
patterns,1 where sound refers to the auditory
effect of articulations made by the vocal ap-
paratus during speech,2 and patterns, to abstract structures that correlate to mind —they
“attract our notice, they grab our attention, they seem in varying degrees to somehow fit
human processes of cognition, to be sense making, to bear intelligibility” (Ratzsch
2001:3). As a core discipline of generative linguistics, phonology is driven by the fol-
lowing assumption (Halle 2002:1):

[T]he overt aspects of language—the articulatory actions and the acoustic
signal they produce—cannot be properly understood without reference to
the covert aspect of language, that is, to the implicit knowledge that en-
ables individuals to speak and understand a language.3

The modern view of phonology —as the study of an aspect of human cognition
rather than the study of an external, physical or social reality— originated during the
late 1950’s and early 1960’s with Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky who were hired at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently amid concerns that the Russian
KGB were close to being able to use telepathy.4 While phonology has never been used

* In general footnotes in this text can be ignored at will.
1 The term is also used to refer to the sound system, or pronunciation, of particular languages,
e.g., ‘the phonology of French’.
2 In this text I focus on the phonology of spoken languages, but the reader should keep in mind
that there is also the phonology of sign languages. (See comment by Chomsky in fn. 5.) Researchers re-
port deep similarities of phonological structure in both modalities, such that sign language phonology and
general phonological theory have proved to be mutually relevant. Well-known researchers in this area
include Wendy Sandler (Sandler 1989, 1993a, 1993b, 1996b, 1996a, 2000) and Diane Brentari (Brentari
1993, 1998). Incidentally, local Plains First Nations had sign language(s) before European contact
(Wurtzburg and Campbell 1995).
3 As Sapir (1925:171) warned, “it is a great fallacy to think of the articulation of a speech sound
as a motor habit.”
4 A recent overview of the history of phonological theory in the twentieth century is available in
FOUNDATIONS 2
for telepathy (by definition, it can’t!),5 to be sure it now has many other applications
outside linguistics. For instance, it is of great consequence to second language instruc-
tors and has received attention among educators because of its importance to reading. It
is important to pathologists who treat individuals with abnormal speech. It has a place
in the development of software for high-technology businesses (e.g., speech recognition,
voice synthesis).6 It is used by writers and poets. It even has forensic applications.7 And
more indirectly, phonology can inspire new perspectives in other fields.8
Phonology has as its main goals, first, to discover the universals concerning
sound patterns in language, i.e., the common elements of all phonological systems, and
second, to place these elements in a theoretical framework that will describe sound pat-
terns that occur in speakers’ minds, and also predict what sound patterns do not occur.
Current phonological theory is sharply divided into two areas: segmental and
prosodic. Segmental [ˌsɛgˈmɛntɫ]̩ phonology focuses on “melody”: speech sounds (seg-
ments), their internal composition and external interactions. One of the greatest discov-
eries in this area is that segments consist of features, and it is through these that seg-
ments interact with each other (Trubetzkoy 1939, Jakobson 1941). Segmental phonology
is therefore concerned with phonological features: what are they, and how are they or-

a special issue of Folia Linguistica (Goldsmith and Laks 2000).
5 “[I]f you look at sign language, it doesn't have a single channel. It has mul-
tiple channels, but articulated language does have a single channel. That is a limitation
of our sensorimotor apparatus and it forces things to be ordered. If we had the ability
to communicate by telepathy, let's say (so that we didn't have to make sounds), there

might be no word ordering in language at all.” –Noam Chomsky (2000)

6 This place is admittedly diminutive in current practice. Consider Hausser (2001:18): “In com-
putational linguistics, the role of phonology is marginal at best. … Computational linguistics analyzes
natural language at a level of abstraction which is independent of any particular medium of manifestation,
e.g., sound.”
7 A classic example is the Prinzivalli case. Following a series of telephoned bomb threats made
to the Los Angeles airport in 1984, Paul Prinzivalli, a cargo handler originally from New York, was ar-
rested and spent ten months in LA County Jail, until he was acquitted on the basis of a linguist’s testi-
mony at trial that the phonological structure of the recorded threats proved that the caller was from Bos-
ton, not New York.
8 The generative study of language, including phonology, has influenced new approaches to sev-
eral areas including religion (e.g., Boyer 1994, 2001) and evolution (e.g., Barbieri 2002). For instance, the
bioinformaticist Heikki Lehväslaiho and his students apply phonological analysis to genomics.
FOUNDATIONS 3
ganized inside segments and between segments? These questions are addressed in this
textbook.
The other major area, prosodic [pɹəˈzɑɾɪk] phonology, focuses on aspects of the
sound system “above” the level of segments, such as timing, stress and intonation. Re-
search into the nature and patterning of these phenomena suggests that speech sounds
are not just arranged linearly, but are hierarchically organized into prosodic structure:
segments into moras and syllables, syllables into stress feet, metrical feet into phono-
logical words, phonological words into phonological phrases, and phonological phrases
into phonological utterances. For example, the prosodic structure associated with the
utterance ‘Too few theoreticians recognize real diversity’9 might be represented as fol-
lows:

A primary objective of prosodic phonology is to spell out the formal properties
of this prosodic hierarchy, which contributes to the organizational structure of utter-
ances, hence presumably to the overall efficiency of human language.

9 ... as uttered by Emmon Bach, as I recall it.