Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T01:13:33.492Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How much homophony is normal?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2011

ABBY KAPLAN
ABBY KAPLAN*
Affiliation:
University of Utah
*
Author's address: Linguistics Department, University of Utah, Languages & Communication Bldg., Salt Lake City, UT 84122, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper argues that neutralizing phonological alternations are sensitive to how much homophony they create among distinct lexical items: neutralizing rules create fewer homophones than expected. Building on a case study of Korean by Silverman (2010), I compare the neutralizing rules of Korean to a large number of hypothetical alternatives generated by Monte Carlo simulations. The simulations reveal that the actual rules of Korean frequently create far fewer homophones than similar (but unattested) rules, even when the rules that are compared are controlled for the number of phonemic contrasts they eliminate. These results suggest that phonological patterns are sensitive not only to high-level contrasts among phonemes but also to contrasts among individual lexical items. The effect is most pronounced when homophones are not weighted by frequency, a result that adds to evidence in the literature that the relevant measure of lexical frequency for many lexicon-sensitive phonological patterns is type frequency, not token frequency.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , November 2011 , pp. 631 - 671
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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.)

Footnotes

[1]

Many thanks to Aaron Kaplan, Yongeun Lee, Jaye Padgett, Dan Silverman, Andy Wedel, and Paul Willis; audiences at UC Santa Cruz, CUNY, and the University of Ottawa; and two anonymous JL referees. All errors are my own. This research was funded in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

References

REFERENCES

Albright, Adam. 2009. Feature-based generalisation as a source of gradient acceptability. Phonology 26, 9–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albright, Adam & Kang, Yoonjung. 2009. Predicting innovative alternations in Korean verb paradigms. Current issues in unity and diversity of languages: Collection of the papers selected from the CIL 18, held at Korea University in Seoul, 1–20. Seoul: Linguistic Society of Korea.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Piepenbrock, Richard & Rijn, Hedderik van. 1995. The CELEX lexical database. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium. [Release 2 (CD-ROM)]Google Scholar
Berent, Iris, Lennertz, Tracy, Smolensky, Paul & Vaknin-Nusbaum, Vered. 2009. Listeners' knowledge of phonological universals: Evidence from nasal clusters. Phonology 26, 75–108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blevins, Juliette & Wedel, Andrew. 2009. Inhibited sound change: An evolutionary approach to lexical competition. Diachronica 26, 143–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Hamann, Silke. 2008. The evolution of auditory dispersion in bidirectional constraint grammars. Ms., Universiteit van Amsterdam & Universität Düsseldorf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campos-Astorkiza, Rebeka. 2007. Minimal contrast and the phonology–phonetics interaction. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Crosswhite, Katherine. 1999. Intra-paradigmatic homophony avoidance in two dialects of Slavic. In Gordon, Matthew K. (ed.), Papers in phonology 2 (UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 1), 48–67. Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Ernestus, Mirjam & Harald Baayen, R.. 2003. Predicting the unpredictable: Interpreting neutralized segments in Dutch. Language 79, 5–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flemming, Edward S. 2002. Auditory representations in phonology (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gessner, Suzanne & Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur. 2004. Anti-homophony effects in Dakelh (Carrier) valence morphology. In Ettlinger, Marc, Fleisher, Nicholas & Park-Doob, Mischa (eds.), 30th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California, Berkeley (BLS 30), 93–104. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Hockett, Charles F. 1967. The quantification of functional load. Word 23, 320–339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ichimura, Larry K. 2006. Anti-homophony blocking and its productivity in transparadigmatic relations. Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University.Google Scholar
Itô, Junko & Mester, Armin. 2004a. The phonological lexicon. In McCarthy, John J. (ed.), Optimality Theory in phonology: A reader, 552–568. Oxford: Blackwell. [First published in Natsuko Tsujimura (ed.), A handbook of Japanese linguistics, 62–100. Oxford: Blackwell.]CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Itô, Junko & Armin, Mester. 2004b. Morphological contrast and merger: Ranuki in Japanese. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 20, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael. 2002. Paradigmatic uniformity and contrast. In Csirmaz, Aniko, Li, Zhiqiang, Nevins, Andrew, Vaysman, Olga & Wagner, Michael (eds.), Phonological answers (and their corresponding questions) (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 42), 141–163. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.Google Scholar
King, Robert D. 1967. Functional load and sound change. Language 43, 831–852.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurisu, Kazutaka. 2001. The phonology of morpheme realization. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Lee, Yongeun. 2006. Sub-syllabic constituency in Korean and English. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Martin, Andrew Thomas. 2007. The evolving lexicon. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Martin, Samuel E. 1992. A reference grammar of Korean. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle.Google Scholar
Martinet, André. 1952. Function, structure, and sound change. Word 8, 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mondon, Jean-François. 2009. The nature of homophony and its effects on diachrony and synchrony. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Moreton, Elliott. 2002. Structural constraints in the perception of English stop–sonorant clusters. Cognition 84, 55–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moreton, Elliott. 2008. Analytic bias and phonological typology. Phonology 25, 83–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ní Chiosáin, Máire & Padgett, Jaye. 2009. Contrast, comparison sets, and the perceptual space. In Parker, Steve (ed.), Phonological argumentation: Essays on evidence and motivation, 103–121. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Ouwayda, Sarah. 2010. Contrast preservation in dialects of North Levantine Arabic. Poster, Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Padgett, Jaye. 2003. Contrast and post-velar fronting in Russian. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21, 39–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Padgett, Jaye. 2009. Systemic contrast and Catalan rhotics. The Linguistic Review 26, 431–463.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Jaye. 2000. Non-uniformity in English secondary stress: The role of ranked and lexically specific constraints. Phonology 17, 237–274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pertz, Doris L. & Bever, Thomas G.. 1975. Sensitivity to phonological universals in children and adolescents. Language 51, 149–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet [B.]. 2001. Why phonological constraints are so coarse-grained. Language and Cognitive Processes 16, 691–698.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2002. Word-specific phonetics. In Gussenhoven, Carlos & Warner, Natasha (eds.), Laboratory phonology (Phonology and Phonetics 7), 101–139. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Silverman, Daniel. 2010. Neutralization and anti-homophony in Korean. Journal of Linguistics 46, 453–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Jennifer L. 2001. Lexical category and phonological contrast. In Kirchner, Robert, Pater, Joe & Wikely, Wolf (eds.), PETL 6: Workshop on the Lexicon in Phonetics and Phonology, 61–72. Edmonton, AZ: University of Arizona.Google Scholar
Sohn, Ho-Min. 1999. The Korean language (Cambridge Language Surveys). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca. 2001a. Directional asymmetries in place assimilation. In Hume, Elizabeth & Johnson, Keith (eds.), The role of speech perception in phonology, 219–250. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca. 2001b. The phonology of perceptibility effects: The P-map and its consequences for constraint organization. Ms., University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Surendran, Dinoj & Niyogi, Partha. 2006. Quantifying the functional load of phonemic oppositions, distinctive features, and suprasegmentals. In Thomsen, Ole Nedergaard (ed.), Competing models of linguistic change: Evolution and beyond, 43–58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trón, Viktor & Rebrus, Péter. 2005. Re-presenting the past: Contrast and uniformity in Hungarian past tense suffixation. In Piñón, Christopher & Siptár, Péter (eds.), Papers from the Düsseldorf Conference: Approaches to Hungarian, vol. 9, 305–327. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.Google Scholar
Ussishkin, Adam & Wedel, Andrew. 2009. Lexical access, effective contrast, and patterns in the lexicon. Ms., University of Arizona.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Dam, Mark. 2007. Plasticity of phonological categories. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Wedel, Andrew. 2004. Self-organization and categorical behavior in phonology. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar