Variation and optionality

Anttila, Artο

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511486371.023

Cited by 140 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…), exhibit similar regularities and, therefore, have to be part of speakers' internalised phonological knowledge (see e.g. Anttila 2003Anttila , 2007 on variability and gradience in other phonological processes).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic variability and grammatical knowledge: an articulatory study of Korean place assimilation

Kochetov

Pouplier

2008

Phonology

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The study reported here uses articulatory data to investigate Korean place assimilation of coronal stops followed by labial or velar stops, both within words and across words. The results show that this place-assimilation process is highly variable, both within and across speakers, and is also sensitive to factors such as the place of articulation of the following consonant, the presence of a word boundary and, to some extent, speech rate. Gestures affected by the process are generally reduced categorically (deleted), while sporadic gradient reduction of gestures is also observed. We further compare the results for coronals to our previous findings on the assimilation of labials, discussing implications of the results for grammatical models of phonological/phonetic competence. The results suggest that speakers' language-particular knowledge of place assimilation has to be relatively detailed and context-sensitive, and has to encode systematic regularities about its obligatory/variable application as well as categorical/gradient realisation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic variability and grammatical knowledge: an articulatory study of Korean place assimilation

Kochetov

Pouplier

2008

Phonology

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“…The first edition of the Blackwell Handbook of Phonological Theory (Goldsmith 1995), which reflects the situation in generative phonology at the beginning of the 1990's, does not even contain the word "variation" in its subject index. In contrast, every handbook since contains a chapter dedicated to variation (Anttila 2002b(Anttila , 2007Coetzee to appear;Coetzee and Pater to appear;Guy 2011). Similarly, several articles on variation have appeared in theoretical, generatively oriented journals over the past decade (Anttila 2002a(Anttila , 2006Anttila et al 2008;Boersma and Hayes 2001;Coetzee 2006;etc.…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These models have all been developed in some version of a constraint-based grammar, be that classic discrete Optimality Theory (OT) (Anttila 1997(Anttila , 2002a(Anttila , 2006(Anttila , 2007Anttila et al 2008;Bane to appear a, b;Coetzee 2004Coetzee , 2006Coetzee , 2009cKiparsky 1993;Reynolds 1994), stochastic OT (Boersma 1997;Boersma and Hayes 2001), or noisy Harmonic Grammar (HG) (Coetzee 2009a;Coetzee and Pater to appear;Jesney 2007) 1 .…”

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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“…Other approaches to variability within phonological theory have modelled variability by positing that speakers have internalized multiple grammars, grammars with partially ranked constraints, probabilistically ranked constraints (Boersma & Hayes, 2001), constraints indexed to certain lexical items or lexical strata, or weighted constraints (see Anttila, 2007 andPater, 2011 for review). Work in this vein develops formal grammatical models of how different factors condition a variable's rate of application, often to address higher-level questions such as: What the set of possible patterns of variation are for a given variable, across dialects (e.g., why is deletion rate never higher before vowels than before consonants), and why variability occurs in some contexts but not others (e.g., in codas but not in onsets, for CSD).…”

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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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Variation and optionality

Cited by 140 publications

References 0 publications

Phonetic variability and grammatical knowledge: an articulatory study of Korean place assimilation

Phonetic variability and grammatical knowledge: an articulatory study of Korean place assimilation

Frequency biases in phonological variation

Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech

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