Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T11:53:16.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The phonologisation of redundancy: length and quality in Welsh vowels*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2017

Pavel Iosad
Pavel Iosad*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
E-mail: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

‘Phonologisation’ is a process whereby a phonetic phenomenon enters the phonological grammar and becomes conceptualised as the result of categorical manipulation of phonological symbols. I analyse the phonologisation of a predictable phonological pattern in Welsh, with particular attention to identifying criteria for whether phonologisation has occurred. I argue for a model where phonologisation experiences bottom-up and top-down biases. From the bottom up, there is pressure to phonologise phenomena with a categorical distribution; from the top down, there exist formal constraints on featural specification. I focus on the requirement for featural specifications to obey the Contrastivist Hypothesis, which denies that redundant features can be involved in phonological computation, in the context of a framework with emergent features. I suggest that the Contrastivist Hypothesis provides a useful boundary condition for emergent-feature theories, whilst independent phonologisation criteria provide contrastivist approaches with a more solid conceptual underpinning.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , May 2017 , pp. 121 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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

*

Portions of this paper were presented at the 1st Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology, the Edinburgh P-workshop, the GLOW workshop on Phonological Specification and Interface Interpretation (Brussels), the 8th North American Phonology Conference (Montreal), the 21st and 22nd Welsh Linguistics Seminars (Gregynog), the 1st Conference on Linguistic Diversity in Wales (Aberystwyth) and the 24th Manchester Phonology Meeting. Thanks to the audiences at these forums for questions and comments, particularly Gwen Awbery, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Josef Fruehwald, Daniel Currie Hall and Michaela Hejná. For help with fieldwork, thanks to Christine Jones and Mererid Hopwood (University of Wales Trinity Saint David) and Diarmuid Johnson (Menter Rhos-y-Gilwen). At Phonology, a huge thanks to three anonymous reviewers, an anonymous associate editor and the editors for numerous questions and suggestions that have immeasurably improved the paper. All errors of fact or interpretation remain entirely mine.

The appendices referred to in the paper are available as online supplementary materials at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675717000057.

References

REFERENCES

Adank, Patti, Smits, Roel & van Hout, Roeland (2004). A comparison of vowel normalization procedures for language variation research. JASA 116. 3099–3107.Google Scholar
Awbery, Gwenllian M. (1984). Phonotactic constraints in Welsh. In Ball, & Jones, (1984). 65–104.Google Scholar
Awbery, Gwenllian M. (1986). Pembrokeshire Welsh: a phonological study. Llandysul: Welsh Folk Museum.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. & Jones, Glyn E. (eds.) (1984). Welsh phonology: selected readings. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. & Williams, Briony (2001). Welsh phonetics. Lewiston: Mellen.Google Scholar
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo (2012). The architecture of grammar and the division of labor in exponence. In Trommer, Jochen (ed.) The morphology and phonology of exponence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 8–83.Google Scholar
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo (2015). Amphichronic explanation and the life cycle of phonological processes. In Honeybone, & Salmons, (2015). 374–399.Google Scholar
Blaho, Sylvia (2008). The syntax of phonology: a radically substance-free approach. PhD dissertation, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard (1939). Menomini morphophonemics. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 8. 105–115.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2015). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 6.0.08). http://www.praat.org.Google Scholar
Botma, Bert & van Oostendorp, Marc (2012). A propos of the Dutch vowel system 21 years on, 22 years on. In Botma, Bert & Noske, Roland (eds.) Phonological explorations: empirical, theoretical and diachronic issues. Berlin: de Gruyter. 135–154.Google Scholar
Burnham, Kenneth P. & Anderson, David R. (2004). Multimodel inference: understanding AIC and BIC in model selection. Sociological Methods and Research 33. 261–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bye, Patrik & de Lacy, Paul (2008). Metrical influences on fortition and lenition. In de Carvalho, Joaquim Brandão, Scheer, Tobias & Ségéral, Philippe (eds.) Lenition and fortition. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 173–206.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. & Hume, Elizabeth V. (1995). The internal organization of speech sounds. In Goldsmith, John A. (ed.) The handbook of phonological theory. Cambridge, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell. 245–306.Google Scholar
Cowper, Elizabeth & Currie Hall, Daniel (2014). ReductiË ad discr~men: where features come from. Nordlyd 41. 145–164.Google Scholar
Crosswhite, Katherine M. (2000). Vowel reduction in Russian: a unified account of standard, dialectal, and ‘dissimilative’ patterns. University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences 1. 107–171.Google Scholar
Dresher, B. Elan (2009). The contrastive hierarchy in phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dresher, B. Elan (2014). The arch not the stones: universal feature theory without universal features. Nordlyd 41. 165–181.Google Scholar
Dresher, B. Elan, Piggott, Glyne & Rice, Keren (1994). Contrast in phonology: overview. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 13. iii–xvii.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Ewan, Dillon, Brian & Idsardi, William J. (2013). A Bayesian evaluation of the cost of abstractness. In Sanz, Montserrat, Laka, Itziar & Tanenhaus, Michael K. (eds.) Language down the garden path: the cognitive and biological basis for linguistic structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 360–384.Google Scholar
Durand, Jacques (2005). Tense/lax, the vowel system of English and phonological theory. In Carr, Philip, Durand, Jacques & Ewen, Colin J. (eds.) Headhood, elements, specification and contrastivity: phonological papers in honour of John Anderson. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 77–97.Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick C., O'Dochartaigh, Cathal, Hicks, William, Morgan, Menna & Laporte, Nadine (2001). Cronfa Electroneg o Gymraeg (CEG): a 1 million word lexical database and frequency count for Welsh. http://www.bangor.ac.uk/canolfanbedwyr/ceg.php.en.Google Scholar
Grawunder, Sven, Asmus, Sabine & Anderson, Cormac (2015). On the correlation of acoustic vowel and coda duration in modern Welsh C(C)VC monosyllables. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.) Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. http://www.icphs2015.info/pdfs/Papers/ICPHS0574.pdf.Google Scholar
Hall, Daniel Currie (2007). The role and representation of contrast in phonological theory. PhD dissertation, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Hall, Daniel Currie (2011). Phonological contrast and its phonetic enhancement: dispersedness without dispersion. Phonology 28. 1–54.Google Scholar
Hannahs, S. J. (2013). The phonology of Welsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, John (1994). English sound structure. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Honeybone, Patrick & Salmons, Joseph C. (eds.) (2015). The Oxford handbook of historical phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. (1976). Phonologization. In Juilland, Alphonse (ed.) Linguistic studies offered to Joseph Greenberg on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Vol. 2: Phonology. Saratoga: Anma Libri. 407–418.Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. (2013). Enlarging the scope of phonologization. In Yu, Alan C. L. (ed.) Origins of sound change: approaches to phonologization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iosad, Pavel (2012). Representation and variation in substance-free phonology: a case study in Celtic. PhD dissertation, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Iosad, Pavel (2017). Welsh vowels. Open Science Framework. Available (February 2017) at http://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/hd3bz.Google Scholar
Iosad, Pavel (forthcoming). The ATR/Laryngeal connection and emergent features. In Botma, Bert & van Oostendorp, Marc (eds.) Primitives of phonological structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman, Fant, C. Gunnar M. & Halle, Morris (1952). Preliminaries to speech analysis: the distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Christine & Thorne, David (1992). Dyfed: blas ar ei thafodieithoedd. Llandysul: Gomer.Google Scholar
Jones, Glyn E. (1971). Hyd llafariaid yn y Gymraeg. Studia Celtica 6. 175–188.Google Scholar
Jones, Glyn E. (1984). The distinctive vowels and consonants of Welsh. In Ball, & Jones, (1984). 40–64.Google Scholar
Jones, Glyn E. (2000). Iaith lafar Brycheiniog: astudiaeth o'i ffonoleg a'i morffoleg. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (2015). Phonologization. In Honeybone, & Salmons, (2015). 563–579.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (forthcoming). Formal and empirical issues in phonological typology. In Hyman, Larry M. & Plank, Frans (eds.) Phonological typology. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Kniazev, S. V. & Waul'skij, E. V. (2007). Genezis dissimiljativnogo jakan'ja (v svjazi s problemoj fonologizacii foneti∏eskix javlenij). Russkij jazyk v nau∏nom osveª∏enii 13. 210–224.Google Scholar
Krämer, Martin (2012). Underlying representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, David Gerwyn (1960). Astudiaeth eirfaol o Gymraeg lafar gogledd-orllewin Ceredigion. MA thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.Google Scholar
Lindblom, Björn (1963). Spectrographic study of vowel reduction. JASA 35. 1773–1781.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, Sara (2013). Laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions in Aymara: contrastive representations and constraint interaction. Phonology 30. 297–345.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, Sara (2016). Consonant harmony in Nilotic: contrastive specifications and Stratal OT. Glossa 1(1):12. 1–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayr, Robert & Davies, Hannah (2011). A cross-dialectal acoustic study of the monophthongs and diphthongs of Welsh. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41. 1–25.Google Scholar
Mielke, Jeff (2008). The emergence of distinctive features. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morén, Bruce (2001). Distinctiveness, coercion and sonority: a unified theory of weight. New York & London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Morén, Bruce (2006). Consonant–vowel interactions in Serbian: features, representations and constraint interactions. Lingua 116. 1198–1244.Google Scholar
Morris, Jonathan (2010). Phonetic variation in North Wales: preaspiration. In Proceedings of the Summer School of Sociolinguistics 2010. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/sssocio/proceedings/Jon.pdf.Google Scholar
Myers, Scott (2000). Boundary disputes: the distinction between phonetic and phonological sound patterns. In Burton-Roberts, Noel, Carr, Philip & Docherty, Gerard (eds.) Phonological knowledge: conceptual and empirical issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 245–272.Google Scholar
Odden, David (2013). Formal Phonology. Nordlyd 40. 249–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearce, Mary (2007). ATR allophones or undershoot in Kera? UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 19. 31–43.Google Scholar
Pilch, Herbert (1958). Das kymrische Lautsystem. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen 75. 24–57.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul (1993). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2016). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Version 3.2.4. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria. http://www.R-project.org.Google Scholar
Scheer, Tobias (2011). A guide to morphosyntax–phonology interface theories: how extra-phonological information is treated in phonology since Trubetzkoy's Grenzsignale. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Scobbie, James M. (2007). Interface and overlap in phonetics and phonology. In Ramchand, Gillian & Reiss, Charles (eds.) The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 17–52.Google Scholar
Sommerfelt, Alf (1925). Studies in Cyfeiliog Welsh: a contribution to Welsh dialectology. Oslo: I Kommission hos Jacob Dybwad.Google Scholar
Strycharczuk, Patrycja (2012). Phonetics–phonology interaction in pre-sonorant voicing. PhD dissertation, University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Thomas, Alan R. (1960). Ffonemau llafarog tafodiaith Dyffryn Wysg. Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 18. 265–270.Google Scholar
Thomas, Alan R. (1961). Ffonemau cytseiniol tafodiaith Dyffryn Wysg. Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 19. 193–201.Google Scholar
Thomas, Alan R. (1966). Systems in Welsh phonology. Studia Celtica 1. 93–127.Google Scholar
Thomas, Ceinwen H. (1993). Tafodiaith Nantgarw: astudiaeth o Gymraeg llafar Nantgarw yng Nghwm Taf, Morgannwg. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Torres-Tamarit, Francesc (2015). Length and voicing in Friulian and Milanese: or why rule-free derivations are needed. NLLT 33. 1351–1386.Google Scholar
Watkins, Arwyn T. (1967). Some phonological features of the Welsh dialect of Llansamlet (West Glamorgan). In Meid, Wolfgang (ed.) Beiträge zur Indogermanistik und Keltologie: Julius Pokorny zum 80. Geburtstag gewidmet. Innsbruck: Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität Innsbruck. 315–322.Google Scholar
Wells, John C. (1979). Final voicing and vowel length in Welsh. Phonetica 36. 344–360.Google Scholar
Wmffre, Iwan (2003). Language and place-names in Wales: the evidence of toponymy in Cardiganshire. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Wmffre, Iwan (2007). Review of Ball & Williams (2001). Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 55. 301–307.Google Scholar
Wood, Simon N. (2006). Generalized additive models: an introduction with R. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Iosad supplementary material

Iosad supplementary material

Download Iosad supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 464.6 KB