Gold Medal Essay, the XIIIth IPO, Warsaw 2005

Complexity in phonetics and phonology: gradience, categoriality, and naturalness

“…This is the fundamental character of what Cohn (1998) terms phonetic and phonological doublets, cases where there are parallel categorical and gradient effects in the same language, with independent evidence suggesting that the former are due to the phonology and the latter result from the implementation of the former. For example, this is seen in patterns of nasalization in several languages (Cohn, 1990); palatalization in English (Zsiga, 1995); vowel devoicing in Japanese (Tsuchida, 1997(Tsuchida, , 1998; as well as vowel harmony vs. vowel-to-vowel coarticulation and vowel harmony, investigated by Beddor and Yavuz (1995) in Turkish and by Przezdziecki (2005) in Yoruba. (See Cohn, 2006b for fuller discussion of this point.…”

“…It is sometimes argued that explicit phonological accounts of naturalness pose a duplication problem. Formal accounts in phonological terms (often attributed to Universal Grammar) parallel or mirror the phonetic roots of such developments, thus duplicating the phonetic source or historical de-velopment driven by the phonetic source (see Przezdziecki, 2005 for recent discussion). We return to this point below.…”