Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T13:39:02.620Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

English Aspiration and Flapping Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Marc Picard
Marc Picard*
Affiliation:
McGill University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In Kahn (1976), one finds a syllable-based reanalysis of certain well-known phonological rules of English. Prominent among these are aspiration and flapping. Given that the belated recognition of the syllable by generative phonologists has generally yielded very interesting and positive results, this reinterpretation of the facts must be seen as a welcome development in that respect.

On the other hand, however, Kahn’s decision to base his syllable-oriented generalizations on the concept of ambisyllabicity must be seriously questioned since the phonological evidence for such a phenomenon is so tenuous, and also because this concept is virtually unfalsifiable as it is not known to have any physical-acoustic or articulatory-correlates whatsoever.

Also, over and above Kahn’s recourse to such an unsubstantiated mechanism, there is the additional problem that the two rules he proposes simply do not correctly account for all the data. A later attempt by Kiparsky (1979) to replace Kahn’s ambisyllabic treatment of these two rules by a metrical analysis involving the foot runs into exactly the same kind of trouble.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , Spring 1984 , pp. 42 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, J.M., and Jones, Charles 1974 Three Theses Concerning Phonological Representations. Journal of Lingustics 10:1–26.Google Scholar
Fujimura, Osamu, and Lovins, Julie 1977 Syllables in Concatenative Phonetic Units. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Hooper, Joan 1976 An Introduction to Natural Generative Phonology. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hooper, Joan 1978 Constraints on Schwa-Deletion in American English. In Recent Developments in Historical Phonology. Fisiak, J., ed. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Jones, Charles 1976 Some Constraints on Medial Consonant Clusters. Language 52:121–130.Google Scholar
Kahn, Daniel 1976 Syllable-based Generalizations in English Phonology. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul 1979 Metrical Structure Assignment is Cyclic. Linguistic Inquiry 10:421–441.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul 1981 Remarks on the Metrical Structure of the Syllable. In Phonologica 1980. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beitrage zur Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter 1971 Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter 1975 A Course in Phonetics. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovitch.Google Scholar
Picard, Marc 1983 Deux règles universelles de démarcation syllabique. La Revue québeécoise de linguistique 12:2.Google Scholar
Pulgram, Ernst 1970 Syllable, Word, Nexus, Cursus. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Vennemann, Theo 1974 Words and Syllables in Natural Generative Grammar. Papers from the Parasession on Natural Phonology. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Vennemann, Theo 1981 Phonology as Non-functional Non-phonetics. Phonologica 1980. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beitrage zur Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar