The road not taken:<i>The Sound Pattern of Russian</i>and the history of contrast in phonology

Dresher, B. Elan; Hall, Daniel Currie

doi:10.1017/s0022226720000377

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 41 publications

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“…For reasons of space (Russian has a very complex consonantal inventory), I will only be presenting an analysis of the coronal consonants (which, after all, are the main candidates for /θ/ substitution). I base my analysis on Dresher and Hall (2020). They provide arguments for the ranking of [voice] above [continuant] in Russian; /ts/ and /tS/ trigger assimilatory devoicing even though they do not contrast with underlying voiced counterparts (/dz/, /dZ/).…”

Section: The Russian Contrastive Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

Archibald

2023

Front. Lang. Sci.

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In this article, I tackle the question of differential substitution in L2 phonology. A classic example of the phenomenon is learners from different L1s attempting to acquire the L2 English interdental fricative /θ/. Speakers of some languages (e.g., Japanese) tend to pronounce the /θ/ as [s] while speakers of other languages (e.g., Russian) tend to pronounce the /θ/ as [t]). Since both Japanese and Russian have both /s/ and /t/ in their phonemic inventories, it is interesting to ask why one language would choose [s] and the other [t]. What I argue in this article is that it is not a local comparison of two sounds, two features, or two phonemes that will determine why one segment rather than another is substituted. Rather, I argue that we must consider the formal representation of the entire segmental inventory (represented as a contrastive hierarchy) in order to understand why the Japanese pick the [s] but the Russian the [t] as the “best” substitute for the English /θ/. What I will demonstrate is that in the languages that substitute [s], [continuant] is the highest-ranked feature that has scope over the place and voice features in the contrastive hierarchy of phonological features. In the languages that substitute [t], the place and voice features rank above [continuant].

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Section: The Russian Contrastive Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

Archibald

2023

Front. Lang. Sci.

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Contrastive feature hierarchies and Germanic phonology

Dresher

2024

NOWELE

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I discuss an analysis of changes in the Scandinavian runic alphabet, or futhark, by Jørgen Rischel (1966). Rischel’s article accounts for some puzzling changes in the futhark by employing contrastive feature hierarchies represented as branching trees. Feature hierarchies can be traced back to the work of Roman Jakobson and his colleagues. They enjoyed a brief period of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, but then disappeared from mainstream phonological theory. However, they were employed in a number of interesting studies of Germanic and other languages whose insights we can still profit from today. The goal of this paper is to bring attention to this largely forgotten approach to phonological analysis, and to spell out the principles that underlie it.

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Restricted Structure Preservation in Stratal OT

Mackenzie

2024

Linguistic Inquiry

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Through analyses of Russian voicing assimilation and German dorsal fricative assimilation, this paper argues for a restricted version of structure preservation and a stratal model of Optimality Theory. Structure preservation (Kiparsky 1985) prohibits the creation of allophones early in the phonological computation. The parallel architecture of Optimality Theory undermines the assumptions of structure preservation and the principle has been widely rejected within OT. This paper demonstrates that processes that are both neutralizing and non-structure-preserving and which involve overlapping sets of targets and triggers, such as Russian voicing assimilation, result in a ranking paradox in parallel OT. Purely allophonic processes, such as German fricative assimilation, do not pose the same difficulties. Analyses of both processes are proposed within the framework of Stratal OT. The use of multiple strata eliminates the ranking paradox illustrated in Russian voicing assimilation and accounts for the interaction of German fricative assimilation and umlaut. By using a solution that relies on stratal OT, this analysis also makes predictions about the interaction between non-structure-preserving phonological processes and morphological structure. Whereas there are cases of strict allophony, like German dorsal fricative assimilation, which have been shown to apply prior to the addition of word-level affixes, this account predicts that non-structure-preserving neutralization cannot take place at the earliest level of evaluation but must apply after the Rich Base is filtered to the language-specific inventory and stem-level processes are applied. In the case of Russian, this is substantiated by application of assimilation across clitic boundaries, requiring phrase-level application.

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The road not taken:The Sound Pattern of Russianand the history of contrast in phonology

Cited by 3 publications

References 41 publications

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

Contrastive feature hierarchies and Germanic phonology

Restricted Structure Preservation in Stratal OT

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