Anti-markedness patterns in French epenthesis: An information-theoretic approach

Hume, Elizabeth; Adda-Decker, Martine; Wedel, Andrew; Gendrot, Cédric; Ussishkin, Adam

doi:10.3765/bls.v37i1.3196

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This finding represents a challenge to classic models of phonology, which cannot easily link sound change to contrast among actual lexical items; indeed, generative phonological formalisms are explicitly designed to exclude actual words from consideration (see section 4 below). In contrast, VUE models contribute testable hypotheses about the relationship between existing lexical forms, their usage, and the development of phonological patterns (e.g., Hay & Maclagan, 2012;Hume et al, 2013;Maclagan & Hay, 2007;Wedel, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional Load and the Lexicon: Evidence that Syntactic Category and Frequency Relationships in Minimal Lemma Pairs Predict the Loss of Phoneme contrasts in Language Change

2013

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All languages use individually meaningless, contrastive categories in combination to create distinct words. Despite their central role in communication, these "phoneme" contrasts can be lost over the course of language change. The century-old functional load hypothesis proposes that loss of a phoneme contrast will be inhibited in relation to the work that it does in distinguishing words. In a previous work we showed for the first time that a simple measure of functional load does significantly predict patterns of contrast loss within a diverse set of languages: the more minimal word pairs that a phoneme contrast distinguishes, the less likely those phonemes are to have merged over the course of language change. Here, we examine several lexical properties that are predicted to influence the uncertainty between word pairs in usage. We present evidence that (a) the lemma rather than surface-form count of minimal pairs is more predictive of merger; (b) the count of minimal lemma pairs that share a syntactic category is a stronger predictor of merger than the count of those with divergent syntactic categories, and (c) that the count of minimal lemma pairs with members of similar frequency is a stronger predictor of merger than that of those with more divergent frequencies. These findings support the broad hypothesis that properties of individual utterances influence long-term language change, and are consistent with findings suggesting that phonetic cues are modulated in response to lexical uncertainty within utterances.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional Load and the Lexicon: Evidence that Syntactic Category and Frequency Relationships in Minimal Lemma Pairs Predict the Loss of Phoneme contrasts in Language Change

2013

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“…It has often been observed that epenthetic vowels tend to be short and otherwise perceptually non-salient (e.g. Hume & Bromberg 2005), and high vowels are often shorter than lower vowels (Catford 1977, Maddieson 1997), so epenthetic high vowels consistent with the general idea that phonological repairs make minimal changes (Steriade 2001). This account is also consistent with the absence of most visually salient labial consonants from the range of epenthetic consonants.…”

Section: Ipa Maps For Relative Frequencymentioning

confidence: 86%

Visualizing phonetic segment frequencies with density-equalizing maps

Mielke¹

2017

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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A method is demonstrated for creating density-equalizing maps of IPA consonant and vowel charts, where the size of a cell in the chart reflects information such as the crosslinguistic frequency of the consonant or vowel. Transforming the IPA charts in such a way allows the visualization of interactions between phonetic features. Density-equalizing maps are used to illustrate a range of facts about consonant and vowel inventories, including the frequency of consonants and vowels and the frequency of common diacritics, and to illustrate the frequency of deletion and epenthesis involving particular consonants and vowels. Solutions are proposed for issues involving genealogical sampling, counting pairs of very similar phones, and counting diacritics in relation to basic symbols.

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“…Because any grammatical system contains traces of its idiosyncratic history, single examples cannot provide convincing evidence either for or against a broader framework such as this. Instead, evaluations of the MOP framework require quantitative studies (ideally over larger cross-linguistic databases) that assess whether the statistical tendencies predicted by it are borne out (see, for example, the cross-linguistic strategy in Wedel et. al (2013) for studying the effect of functional load on predicting phoneme mergers; see also Graff 2012;Graff & Jaeger 2009;Piantadosi et al 2011Piantadosi et al , 2012.…”

Section: Tests Of the Mop Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Of particular relevance to the current purpose, case studies have demonstrated that some properties of phonological systems can be derived from information theoretic or Bayesian considerations about message transmission, including work on allophony (Hall 2009(Hall , 2012, assimilation (Turnbull, Seyfarth, Hume & Jaeger, in prep), epenthesis (Hume & Bromberg 2005;Hong 2011;Tily & Kuperman 2012), markedness (Hume 2005;Hume et al 2016), phoneme mergers (Wedel et al 2013a,b), vowel harmony (Goldsmith & Riggle 2012), and consonant deletion (Cohen Priva 2015). What has been lacking to date is a larger picture of how these individual pieces fit together to predict the shape of phonological systems more generally (though see, e.g., Cohen Priva 2012; Flemming 2010; Wedel 2012, Hall 2013Hume & Mailhot 2013;Moulin-Frier et al 2015 for steps in this direction). Providing this larger picture is our goal here.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Message Shapes Phonology

Ab¹,

Hall²,

Jaeger³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Based on a diverse and complementary set of theoretical and empirical findings, we describe an approach to phonology in which sound patterns are shaped by the trade-off between biases supporting message transmission accuracy and resource cost. We refer to this approach as Message-Oriented Phonology. The evidence suggests that these biases influence the form of messages, defined with reference to a language's morphemes, words or higher levels of meaning, rather than influencing phonological categories directly. Integrating concepts from information theory and Bayesian inference with the existing body of phonological research, we propose a testable model of phonology that makes quantitative predictions. Moreover, we show that approaching language as a system of message transfer provides greater explanatory coverage of a diverse range of sound patterns.

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Anti-markedness patterns in French epenthesis: An information-theoretic approach

Cited by 12 publications

References 24 publications

Functional Load and the Lexicon: Evidence that Syntactic Category and Frequency Relationships in Minimal Lemma Pairs Predict the Loss of Phoneme contrasts in Language Change

Functional Load and the Lexicon: Evidence that Syntactic Category and Frequency Relationships in Minimal Lemma Pairs Predict the Loss of Phoneme contrasts in Language Change

Visualizing phonetic segment frequencies with density-equalizing maps

The Message Shapes Phonology

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