Inherent variability and the obligatory contour principle

Guy, Gregory R.; Boberg, Charles

doi:10.1017/s095439450000185x

Cited by 134 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The relatively simple coding used here allows us to best address our research question of how the effect of phonological context is modulated by boundary strength, with maximum statistical power, given that there is relatively little data for each phonological context as pause length increases. Second, our coding for preceding context differs from much previous work on CSD in the sociolinguistic and phonological variation literatures, which follow influential work such as Guy and Boberg (1997); Labov (1989), largely based on North American varieties. We follow the coding of Tagliamonte and Temple (2005) for our sample of largely British speakers, because this is the most authoritative CSD study to date on a British variety.…”

Section: Phonological Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech

Tanner

Sonderegger

Wagner

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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Many phonological processes can be affected by segmental context spanning word boundaries, which often lead to variable outcomes. This paper tests the idea that some of this variability can be explained by reference to production planning. We examine coronal stop deletion (CSD), a variable process conditioned by preceding and upcoming phonological context, in a corpus of spontaneous British English speech, as a means of investigating a number of variables associated with planning: Prosodic boundary strength, word frequency, conditional probability of the following word, and speech rate. From the perspective of production planning, (1) prosodic boundaries should affect deletion rate independently of following context; (2) given the locality of production planning, the effect of the following context should decrease at stronger prosodic boundaries; and (3) other factors affecting planning scope should modulate the effect of upcoming phonological material above and beyond the modulating effect of prosodic boundaries. We build a statistical model of CSD realization, using pause length as a quantitative proxy for boundary strength, and find support for these predictions. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that the locality of production planning constrains variability in speech production, and have practical implications for work on CSD and other variable processes.

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Section: Phonological Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech

Tanner

Sonderegger

Wagner

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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“…These tokens showed unexpectedly low deletion rates in the corpus. In these tokens, r and l were often phonetically realized as coloring on the preceding vowel rather than as a separate consonant, so that -rt/-rd and -lt/-ld words often do not actually end in consonant clusters phonologically (Guy and Boberg 1997). Lastly, we removed words such as thought and could, that end orthographically but not phonologically in -Ct/-Cd.…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency biases in phonological variation

Coetzee

Kawahara

2012

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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Abstract. In the past two decades, variation has received a lot of attention in mainstream generative phonology, and several different models have been developed to account for variable phonological phenomena. However, all existing generative models of phonological variation account for the overall rate at which some process applies in a corpus, and therefore implicitly assume that all words are affected equally by a variable process. In this paper, we show that this is not the case. Many variable phenomena are more likely to apply to frequent than infrequent words. A model that accounts perfectly for the overall rate of application of some variable process therefore does not necessarily account very well for the actual application of the process to individual words. We illustrate this with two examples, English t/d-deletion and Japanese geminate devoicing. We then augment one existing generative model (noisy Harmonic Grammar) to incorporate the contribution of usage frequency to the application of variable processes. In this model, the influence of frequency is incorporated by scaling the weights of faithfulness constraints up or down for words of different frequencies. This augmented model accounts significantly better for variation than existing generative models.

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“…His results also demonstrate that cumulativity effects do not only occur for multiple violations of different constraints, but also for multiple violations of the same constraint. Furthermore, cumulativity also seems to hold for phonological constraints: Guy and Boberg (1997) …”

Section: Cumulativitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Gradience in linguistic data

Sorace

Keller

2005

Lingua

216

143

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This paper provides a survey of the theoretical and experimental findings on degrees of grammaticality, with a special focus on gradience in syntax. We first discuss the theoretical relevance of gradient data, and argue that such data should be elicited experimentally in order to be reliable. We then review a set of experimental findings on gradience, which lead to the hypothesis that linguistic constraints come in two types: hard constraints whose violations trigger strong unacceptability, and soft constraints that lead to only mild unacceptability. There is experimental evidence that both types of constraints are subject to constraint ranking and show cumulativity and ganging up effects. However, soft and hard constraints differ with respect to context effects, crosslinguistic variation, and developmental optionality. This set of properties forms the basis for an evaluation of existing proposals for models of gradience in grammar, with a particular focus on models that extend Optimality Theory.

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Inherent variability and the obligatory contour principle

Cited by 134 publications

References 9 publications

Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech

Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech

Frequency biases in phonological variation

Gradience in linguistic data

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