In Chichewa, a Bantu language spoken mainly in Malawi, there is a contrast between high and low tone, as illustrated by such minimal pairs as mtengo ‘price’ vs. mténgo ‘tree’. But there is a strong asymmetry between the two tones in their phonological behaviour: high tone is phonologically active, while low tone is phonologically inert. Tone changes occur in Chichewa only if there is a high tone present in the phrase; a phrase composed only of low-toned morphemes is always realised unchanged with all low tones. The tonal phonology of the language can be described completely without reference to low tone (Kanerva 1989), as is typical for the Bantu languages (Stevick 1969).

I argue in this paper that this asymmetry is due to underspecification. The contrast in Chichewa is a privative one between high tone and no tone. Low tone is phonologically inert because it is simply the absence of tone. In particular, low tone is absent from surface representation. Syllables that are not specified as high-toned are assigned F0 by a non-linear transition function, as proposed for English intonation by Pierre-humbert (1980).

Linguistic sound systems necessarily possess contrastive values that are sufficiently distinct from one another that their individual characters may be learned by the listener. In this way, any given value in any given system fulfils its functional role of rendering forms distinct which differ in meaning. Articulatory, aerodynamic, acoustic and auditory constraints serve to mediate between such sound–meaning correspondences in non-trivial ways. Indeed, if it can be shown that the sound patterns of language are in part explainable by these physical systems, then students of linguistic sound systems would do well to study in detail the phonetic base. Consider an example case. Laryngeal gestures and supralaryngeal gestures are by and large articulatorily independent of each other. Thus, for example, a voiceless aspirated stop consists of an oral occlusion, cued by silence, as well as an articulatorily independent laryngeal abduction, cued by broadband noise. Were the phonetic realisation of these two gestures strictly simultaneous, the cues signalling the laryngeal abduction would not be perceived as such by the listener (*[ot]). A listener can tell that there is no voicing, but cannot recover more specific information regarding the state of the glottis during oral closure. Stated simply, the full closure here reduces the acoustic output to zero. With zero acoustic energy, no source information other than silence is transmitted to the listener. However, upon staggering the two gestures, the otherwise obscured information is rendered salient.

Perhaps the most important insight in phonological theory since the introduction of the concept of the phoneme has been the role that distinctive features play in phonological theory (Jakobson et al. 1952). Most research since Jakobson's early formulation has focused on the segmental properties of these features without reference to their hierarchical organisation. Recent research, however, has shed considerable light on this latter aspect of the phoneme as a phonological unit. In his seminal article ‘The geometry of phonological features’, for example, Clements (1985), building on earlier work of scholars such as Goldsmith (1976), argues that features are not ‘bundles’ in Bloomfield's sense, but are, in fact, organised into phonological trees with each branch corresponding to what has been called a tier. An overview of the current state of feature geometry can be found in Clements & Hume (forthcoming) and Kenstowicz (1994).

In this article I discuss some aspects of a model of segmental structure, in particular the representation of vowels. The central claim is that vowels can be represented in terms of three unary primitives, organised in a binary structure involving both DOMINANCE and DEPENDENCY relations.

My goal is to explore the consequences of this claim. Certain aspects of the proposal differ in matters of principle from the theory of segmental structure advanced in Chomsky & Halle (1968; henceforth SPE), and subsequent work in this tradition up to and including the ‘geometrical model’ as developed in Steriade (1982), Clements (1985), Sagey (1986), McCarthy (1988) and Halle (1988), even though it is argued in some of these works that certain features are unary, that they are organised hierarchically and that certain features enter into dependency relations.

Whistled languages are communication systems that convey an open-ended set of messages by transposing selected acoustic aspects of the spoken languages that serve as their source. There are two types: those based on non-tone languages, which transpose F2 patterns, and those based on tone languages, which transpose tone melodies. This paper examines basic phonological and phonetic properties of both types of whistled language, with the goal of eliciting their basic similarities and differences. Pitch variation is found to encode segmental distinctions in the first type of language and tonal distinctions in the second. What is common to both is the central role of amplitude modulations, which provide a frame with respect to which segmental boundaries are defined and major segmental classes are distinguished. Examples are taken from whistled languages based on Spanish, Turkish, Moba and Hmong, among others.

In the theory of articulatory phonology Browman & Goldstein (1986, 1990, 1992) claim that place assimilation is mainly the result of the overlap of gestures and the perception of these overlapping gestures as a single gesture. Ohala (1990) makes a similar claim. The present study provides interesting experimental evidence against this explanation of assimilation as a result of gestural overlap and resulting misperception, and for the importance of gestural reduction.

Phonological underspecification plays an important role in phonological theory. Some features are left blank in underlying representations. If they are relevant to the pronunciation of a segment, they are filled in at some point in the derivation; otherwise, they are left blank permanently. When underspecification was reintroduced to phonological theory in the 1980s, researchers originally assumed that all information that could be considered predictable had to be underspecified in underlying representations (Kiparsky 1982; Archangeli 1984). Information can be considered predictable in one of two ways. First, information is predictable if it is redundant or allophonic; the voicing and nasality of the vowel in the word grin [grin] in English are predictable (because vowels are always voiced, and are always nasalised before a nasal) and omitted from underlying representations. Second, given that a feature is binary, it is possible to leave one value of the feature blank in underlying representations; if the segment is not specified as e.g. [+ F], then it must be [− F], by default. The approach that defines predictability in this fashion is known as RADICAL UNDERSPECIFICATION

The representation of geminate consonants remains a controversial topic in phonological theory. In a skeletal theoretic approach, for example, a geminate is represented as bipositional: a single root node multiply linked to two skeletal positions, as in (1) (see e.g. Clements & Keyser 1983, Levin 1985).

formula here

Conversely, in moraic theory, geminates are inherently moraic (see e.g. Hayes 1989, 1995, Davis 1994, 1996). Thus, an underlying geminate consonant differs from a single consonant of the same quality in terms of a mora, as shown in (2):

formula here

It is noteworthy that evidence bearing on the representation of geminates has thus far come predominantly from the patterning of intervocalic geminates, where the first part of a geminate occurs in coda position. Discussion of syllable-initial geminates, on the other hand, has received little attention in the literature.

This study is concerned with the identifiability of intonational phrase boundaries across familiar and unfamiliar languages. Four annotators segmented a corpus of more than three hours of spontaneous speech into intonational phrases. The corpus included narratives in their native German, but also in three languages of Indonesia unknown to them. The results show significant agreement across the whole corpus, as well as for each subcorpus. We discuss the interpretation of these results, including the hypothesis that it makes sense to distinguish between phonetic and phonological intonational phrases, and that the former are a universal characteristic of speech, allowing listeners to segment speech into intonational phrase-sized units even in unknown languages.

This article presents a novel OT analysis of ternary rhythm, using the restrictive format of McCarthy (2003)'s categorical alignment constraints, which we will refer to as ‘non-intervention constraints’, using the terminology of Ellison (1994), and argues for the rehabilitation of internally layered feet in metrical representations (i.e. feet with one layer of recursion). By means of a computer-generated factorial typology, we demonstrate that the constraint set proposed here generates the full typology of binary and ternary rhythm. The resulting typology suggests that there is no absolute boundary between binary and ternary systems; rather, a continuum emerges, such that binary and ternary feet may coexist in rhythmic stress systems.

The functional equivalence of CVV and CVC syllables, as opposed to CV syllables, is a time-honoured observation holding true for numerous languages over a variety of phonological and morphological phenomena, including stress assignment (cf. Newman 1972 for a review). Traditionally, the opposition between the two types of syllables has been informally described by reference to syllable weight: CVV and CVC syllables are heavy, CV syllables are light (e.g. La Grasserie 1909: 31–32). It has also been observed, however, that in languages sensitive to the CV/CVV distinction, CVC syllables do not necessarily pattern with CVV syllables, but may instead pattern with CV syllables, thus counting as light rather than heavy (Hyman 1985: 5–6; McCarthy & Prince 1986: 32–34; Hayes 1989: 255–256).

Recent research on the acquisition of natural vs. unnatural phonological processes provides some support for the idea that learning a natural process is easier than learning an unnatural one (Wilson 2003, 2006, Pycha et al.2003, Pater & Tessier 2005). This study extends those findings by comparing the acquisition of two stress patterns that are identical except in naturalness. Learners were native speakers of English, a language with variable stress, and French, a fixed stress language. Both English and French speakers learned the natural pattern significantly better than the unnatural. The artificial languages specifically neutralised the phonetic cues that might have given a perceptual advantage to the natural language. The findings suggest that a naturalness bias aids in the distinguishing and learning of a phonological pattern. To explain the results, I argue for an interaction between a general and a language-specific cognitive mechanism.

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.

As Mutaka & Hyman (1990) and Mutaka (1994) show, the Kinande reduplication patterns in (1) present several analytical challenges (eri- is the infinitive prefix; the reduplicant is underlined):

We argue that there is no need to split phonological representations into two worlds: one syllabic and another in which word stress is calculated. We show that both syllable- and stress-related phenomena can be accounted for with a single set of representations, if traditional syllabic analysis is modified in one central respect: what is traditionally taken to be a coda–onset cluster is interpreted as two independent onsets enclosing an empty nucleus. Accordingly, our proposal may be understood as a development of the idea that underlies classical metrical grids, i.e. that stress-relevant units project to higher levels and are therefore visible for stress. The units in the proposal made here, however, are uniformly nuclei. Contentful nuclei are always projected, while their empty counterparts (i.e. codas in traditional approaches) may or may not be. The weightlessness of onsets directly follows from this approach.

This paper is concerned with syllable universals, especially the claim that all languages have syllables. Expanding beyond my earlier work, I take a new look at Gokana, the major counterexample to the universal syllable, and present overlooked (but ambiguous) evidence for a weight-insensitive bisyllabic trochee. After demonstrating the theory-dependent nature of absolute universals, and distinguishing between analytic vs. descriptive claims, I focus on the latter as a means of ‘normalising’ the discussion of what constitutes evidence for the syllable, both in Gokana and in general. A typological approach is argued for in which languages differ in the nature and extent of the ‘activation’ of phonological properties, with Gokana representing a language which only marginally activates the syllable, if at all. The paper ends by situating the issue within the context of recent discussions of universals and diversity (Evans & Levinson 2009), which have not dealt primarily with phonology.

This paper reports on a study of Polish stress, the only uncontested example of a bidirectional system with internal lapses (Kager 2001, McCarthy 2003). The results indicate that Polish stress is non-iterative, a finding that seriously calls into question the existence of this particular stress type. An analysis of the acoustic prominence of syllables traditionally associated with different stress levels suggests that Polish simple words exhibit only one (penultimate) prominence. The stress pattern in compounds is less uniform; they can carry one or two (penultimate) stresses, depending on their prosodic structure. I analyse the distribution of stresses in compounds as governed by clash avoidance. Specifically, compound stems are parsed into separate PWds and assigned separate stresses only if the emergent trochees are non-adjacent. Hence, four-syllable compounds like /tsuʤɔ-ˈʑεmʲεts/ ‘foreigner’ have one stress, while compounds like /banaˈnɔvɔ-arbuˈzɔvɨ/ ‘banana-watermelon’ have two. I ascribe this pattern to the undominated ranking of the *FtFt constraint.

Among 4,499 segmental malformations found in English loanwords in three large corpora of French, the laryngeal /h/ is the only segment that is never adapted, i.e. replaced by another segment. We suggest that the systematic deletion of /h/ in French follows from the fact that, phonologically, French, like Portuguese and Italian, does not employ the Pharyngeal node, the articulator that characterises gutturals. This prevents English /h/ from being handled phonologically (deleted or substituted) in those languages. The non-availability of the Pharyngeal node also explains systematic deletion of the pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Arabic loanwords in French. In contrast, English /h/ is adapted by languages employing the Pharyngeal node phonologically, such as Spanish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Mandarin Chinese, Greek and Russian. Likewise, the availability of the Pharyngeal node in Fula and English allows the adaptation of Arabic pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Fula, and non-glottal gutturals in English.

Since the advent of distinctive feature theory, few issues have received as many interpretations as the phonological representation of vowel height. Vowel height features have been denned acoustically and articulatorily, have allowed three, four or five distinct heights, have been unary, binary and n-ary, and have been on a single tier, multiple tiers or in various head-dependency relationships. It is fair to say that there is no consensus on how vowel height should be represented. While many generative phonologists have been quite content working for nearly three decades with a pair of binary vowel height features, the literature of this period includes a steady flow of criticisms of this approach as well as suggestions for improvement or radical change. This literature generally addresses itself to two problems inherent in the SPE features [high] and [low] and the three vowel heights they define: First, how does one account for systems with four (five?) vowel heights? Second, how can rules that raise (lower) vowel heights by one step each be accounted for? In the first question we ask what the theory has to say about distinctive oppositions such as /i e ∊ æ/ in the second question we ask what the theory has to say about a rule such as one that would lower /i/ to [e] and /e/ to [∊].

The present article provides a reanalysis of word-edge coronal obstruents in German and English commonly assumed to be extrasyllabic (e.g. the [s] in German Gips ‘plaster' and in English lapse). It will be argued below that (i) there are no extrasyllabic consonants in surface representations in German and English and that surface forms are fully syllabified, and (ii) there is no derivational stage in which extrasyllabicity in either of these languages exists. The evidence commonly presented in support of representations with extrasyllabic consonants will be shown to be compatible with fully syllabified surface representations. An optimality-theoretic treatment with constraints referring to fully syllabified output representations will be proposed.