Speech Aerodynamics and Phonological Universals

Jaeger, Jeri J.

doi:10.3765/bls.v4i0.2221

Cited by 95 publications

(31 citation statements)

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“…Furthermore, this interaction may be a facet of a more general correlation between vowel openness (closeness) and consonant voicing (devoicing); typologically, if a language allophonically devoices vowels, high vowels are devoiced much more regularly than non-high vowels, especially when they occur between two voiceless consonants (Greenberg, 1969, pp. 162-165;Jaeger, 1978;Meneses and Albano, 2015, this volume). High vowels, having a relatively close constriction, impede the flow of air more than low vowels, which can help to decrease transglottal pressure enough to extinguish or at least reduce voicing (Ohala, 1983, pp.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variable Phonological Rules and ‘Quantal' Perception as a Source of Probabilistic Sound Change: The Case of Intervocalic Voicing in Old Tuscan

Canalis

2015

Phonetica

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The origin and nature of ‘irregular', ‘sporadic' sound changes have been debated by different theories of phonological change since at least the Neogrammarians. They are often attributed to non-phonological factors, as analogy or borrowing, or to the non-(purely)-phonological mechanism of lexical diffusion. The aim of this paper is to show that an irregular sound change in the historical phonology of Tuscan - namely the voicing of some intervocalic voiceless stops - is not due to borrowing (as often argued), but to a variable and allophonic voicing rule, whose output was only partially subject to phonological recategorization. The most likely causes for this irregular outcome are the variable strength intervocalic voicing had in different environments, the interaction with another lenition process and the perceptual ambiguity of the lenited stops.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variable Phonological Rules and ‘Quantal' Perception as a Source of Probabilistic Sound Change: The Case of Intervocalic Voicing in Old Tuscan

Canalis

2015

Phonetica

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“…In this environment, the stop's release is inherently somewhat fricated, due to the closeness of the tongue blade to the hard palate as it is released into the following vowel: the affrication is stronger the higher and fronter the vowel, and the greater the coarticulation between the stop and the following vocoid (e.g. in English casual speech /mit ju/ -[mit S j«] ('meet you')); it is also stronger in voiceless than voiced stops, due to the typically louder release burst in the former (Ohala 1983, Jaeger 1978 In sum, in those languages for which we have careful phonetic descriptions, spirantization outputs are described as having weak friction, no friction, or some kind of phonetically or pragmatically conditioned variation between the two. In less explicit descriptions, the nonstridency of the spirantization outputs can be inferred from the absence of sibilants and labiodentals.…”

Section: Assibilation Assibilatory Spirantization Processes (Eg T mentioning

confidence: 99%

An Effort Based Approach to Consonant Lenition

Kirchner¹

2013

148

167

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My fellow students at UCLA all helped create an atmosphere of creativity and discovery, for which I am grateful. But in particular, I wish to thank Edward Flemming, one of the most brilliant people I've ever met, without whose pioneering work this dissertation would be inconceivable; Richard Wright, whose brain I have shamelessly and repeatedly picked (I hope I can somehow eventually repay the debt); Rod Casali, for helping me pretend to know something about physics; and Peggy (sorry, Margaret)MacEachern, for general camaraderie, thought-provoking discussions on a variety of linguistic and philosophical issues, and drawings of horses for Miriam.Thanks to Amy Weinberg, my first phonology teacher(!), who helped rescue me from a legal career (shudder), and to Marie Huffman, who got me excited about phonology and very wisely told me to go to UCLA.To Donna Albino: thanks for helping me stay centered as a human being.To my wife Suzanne: I started graduate school as an anti-sexist egalitarian idealist, and as this dissertation took over my life, I gradually degenerated into a typical nerd husband who spent all day hunched over the computer while you cooked, cleaned, and took care of the girls, as well as taught. Thank you. And now it's your turn.To my daughters, Miriam and Naomi: OK, I'm ready to play with you now. Professor Donca Steriade, ChairDespite the pervasiveness of lenition in the sound systems of natural language, this class of patterns has eluded adequate characterization in previous theories of phonology. Specifically, previous theories have failed to capture formally the phonetic unity of the various lenition processes (e.g. degemination, voicing, spirantization, debuccalization, deletion), or to account for the environments in which lenition typically occurs.

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“…In terms of the aerodynamic difficulty that voiced geminates present, this ob-servation makes sense (Hayes and Steriade, 2004;Jaeger, 1978;Ohala, 1983;Ohala and Riordan, 1979;Westbury, 1979). To maintain voicing, it is necessary to keep the intraoral air pressure lower than subglottal air pressure.…”

Section: Seven Hypotheses Testedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing

Kawahara

2011

J East Asian Linguist

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Nishimura (2003) first pointed out that in Japanese loanwords, voiced geminates devoice optionally when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent i.e. when they violate OCP(voice) (e.g. /baggu/ → [bakku] 'bag'). This devoicing of geminates has been used to make several theoretical claims in the recent phonological literature. However, these claims have so far largely been based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). Kawahara (in press) addressed this problem by conducting a rating study. The first aim of this study, building on Kawahara (in press), is to further support the empirical foundation of these theoretical claims by way of a large-scale rating study. The current study shows that (i) the OCP and geminacy each affect naturalness rating of devoicing, and (ii) that there is nevertheless something special about the combination of the OCP and geminacy.The second aim is to test an assumption behind the recent literature on this phenomenon.The assumption is that this devoicing pattern is monolithic-i.e. all voiced geminates uniformly undergo devoicing in a certain phonological environment. The current experiment shows that this assumption is too simplistic. In particular it shows (i) speakers rate the devoicing of affricates as natural as that of stops, (ii) speakers find devoicing of items that merge with other lexical items less natural, (iii) speakers rate devoicing as more natural when there are multiple triggers, (iv) speakers find devoicing of [dd] more natural than that of [gg], and (v) speakers find devoicing of more frequent items more natural.2

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Speech Aerodynamics and Phonological Universals

Abstract: Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1978), pp. 312-329

Cited by 95 publications

References 0 publications

Variable Phonological Rules and ‘Quantal' Perception as a Source of Probabilistic Sound Change: The Case of Intervocalic Voicing in Old Tuscan

Variable Phonological Rules and ‘Quantal' Perception as a Source of Probabilistic Sound Change: The Case of Intervocalic Voicing in Old Tuscan

An Effort Based Approach to Consonant Lenition

Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing

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