Ranjan Sen | The University of Sheffield (original) (raw)

Books by Ranjan Sen

-- Combines detailed philological investigation with theoretical and experimental approaches to ... more -- Combines detailed philological investigation with theoretical and experimental approaches to phonology and phonetics
-- Evaluates the diachronic role of syllable structure, a major debate in historical phonology
-- Brings together large amounts of evidence from a variety of sources

Syllable and Segment in Latin offers new and detailed analyses of five long-standing problems in Latin historical phonology. In so doing, it clarifies the relative roles of synchronic phonological structure and phonetics in guiding sound change. While the phenomena can predominantly be explained by a reductionist view of diachronic phonology, claiming that demands of speech production and perception alone motivate and constrain historical development, the author shows that synchronic structure played the pivotal role of governing significant (but not immediately apparent) categorical and gradient surface variants, and that some phonetically explicable developments were in fact initiated and constrained by structural analogy.

Ranjan Sen considers examines clear and dark /l/, inverse compensatory lengthening, syllabification before stop + liquid in vowel reduction, vocalic epenthesis in stop + /l/, and consonantal assimilations. He ascertains the phonological conditions for each phenomenon, reconstructs the motivations for the changes, and develops a methodology for the appropriate use of evidence from non-current languages to evaluate theories of diachronic phonology. He evaluates the likely phonetic and phonological influences by investigating studies across languages, establishing a secure evidence base through detailed philological examination, and reconstructing the phonetics - through both general principles and pertinent experimental studies - and the relevant phonological structure of the language.

The book will appeal to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonology, Classical philology, and Indo-European linguistics.

Readership: Graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, particularly those focusing on phonology, and in Romance, Classical, and Indo-European linguistics.

Keywords: Latin, historical phonology, syllable, dark /l/, compensatory lengthening, stop + liquid, vowel reduction, epenthesis, assimilation, sound change.

Papers by Ranjan Sen

This paper gives an account of plans for constructing a searchable database of eighteenth-century... more This paper gives an account of plans for constructing a searchable database of eighteenth-century English phonology, an area which has hitherto received little attention from corpus linguistics. The project draws on a sample of eighteenth-century primary sources to construct a searchable database which will eventually provide visualisations of the distribution of phonological variants in time, space and social class.
The project incorporates data from pronouncing dictionaries and other texts dealing with pronunciation published in the second half of the 18th century. The data will be recoded in the form of Unicode transcriptions of as many of the approximately 1,700 words used to exemplify John Wells’ (1982) Standard Lexical Sets as appear in the texts chosen, together with supplementary sets chosen to represent consonantal variants such as /hw/~/w/ in WHICH, etc. The use of these sets and their associated keywords is standard practice in studies of variation and change in English, and including the full range of example words allows for differences in lexical distribution between the eighteenth-century texts, and between these and the contemporary accents described by Wells. Although all the eighteenth-century texts purported to describe the ‘best’ English, they were compiled by authors from different parts of the English-speaking world (mainly different regions of England, Scotland and Ireland but including some from North America) and so can provide evidence for geographical diffusion of innovations. (Beal 1999, C. Jones 2006).
The entries will be tagged according to the main lexical set to which they belong. Thus, a researcher interested in the distribution of words in Wells’s (1982) PRICE and CHOICE sets will be able to find how each of the example words from these sets was transcribed in each of the 18th-century sources included in the database. There will also be links to descriptive and prescriptive comments included in the primary sources. The database will also include metadata providing background information on the texts, such as place of publication, birthplace, occupation and social class of author, and bibliographical references to published work referring to these sources.
This paper provides an account of the design of this database and presents the results of a pilot study demonstrating how such a database can be used to answer questions concerning the chronological, social, geographical and phonological distribution of variation between /hw/ ~/w/ ~ /h/ in WHICH, WHO, NOWHERE, etc. which is of interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists and historical phonologists.

During the fixed initial-stress period of Latin (sixth to fifth centuries BC), internal open syll... more During the fixed initial-stress period of Latin (sixth to fifth centuries BC), internal open syllable vowels were totally neutralised, usually raising to /i/ (*per.fa.ki.o: > perficio: ‘I complete’), whereas in closed syllables /a/ was raised to /e/, but the other vowels remained distinct (*per.fak.tos > perfectus ‘completed’). Miller (1972) explains closed syllable resistance by positing internal secondary stress on closed syllables. However, evidence from vowel reduction and syncope suggest that internal syllables never bore stress in early archaic times. A typologically unusual alternative is proposed: contrary to the pattern normally found (Maddieson 1985), vowels had longer duration in closed syllables than in open syllables, as in Turkish and Finnish, thus permitting speakers to attain the targets for non-high vowels in closed syllables. This durational pattern is manifested not only in vowel reduction, but also in the quantitative changes seen in ‘ classical ’ and ‘inverse’ compensatory lengthenings, the development CV:CV > CVC and ‘superheavy’ degemination (V:CCV>V:CV).

Exon’s Law of Latin syncope (1906: 128) states that ‘In all words or word-groups of four or more ... more Exon’s Law of Latin syncope (1906: 128) states that ‘In all words or word-groups of four or more syllables bearing the chief accent on a long syllable, a short unaccented medial vowel was necessarily syncopated, but might be restored by analogy’. Exon’s insights that any light internal syllable could be a target, and the weight of the stressed syllable was relevant, combined with a careful re-examination of the evidence according to phonetics, metrics and chronology, helps find some order amid the chaos. Syncope was not a monolithic archaic Latin phenomenon, but continued to occur with different metrical, phonotactic and morphological constraints in different time-periods and registers. Six syncopes up to classical Latin can be identified with their own synchronic motivations, and with different phonetic environments: (1) archaic Stress-to-Weight Principle (SWP) syncope, (2) alignment syncope, (3) archaic parsing syncope, (4) *(LLL) syncope, (5) early SWP syncope, and (6) early/classical parsing syncope.

PLEASE REFER TO CHAPTER 4 OF SEN (2015) WHICH SUPERSEDES THIS PAPER This is a very early version... more PLEASE REFER TO CHAPTER 4 OF SEN (2015) WHICH SUPERSEDES THIS PAPER
This is a very early version of Chapter 4 of my book 'Syllable and Segment in Latin' (see Books), which is much-revised and considerably more comprehensive. The core of the general argument remains the same.

Database by Ranjan Sen

The Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) is an online database designed for the s... more The Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) is an online database designed for the study of eighteenth-century English phonology, which will allow users to investigate the social, regional and lexical distribution of phonological variants in eighteenth-century English. It will serve as a source bank for quantitative and qualitative studies, thereby meeting the demands of the growing research community in historical phonology and dialectology in particular (e.g. Honeybone & Salmons 2014) and in Late Modern English in general (e.g. Mugglestone 2003, Hickey 2010).

The database will incorporate data from key sources (e.g. pronouncing dictionaries) published in the second half of the eighteenth century in the form of IPA transcriptions. We will annotate as many of the approximately 1,700 individual keywords used to exemplify John Wells’ Standard Lexical Sets of vocalic variants as can be found in the selected sources, to which we will add supplementary sets of consonantal variants.

Invited Speaker by Ranjan Sen

'What keeps a historical phonology up at night?' Part I: Phonologization (3 December) Part II: St... more 'What keeps a historical phonology up at night?'
Part I: Phonologization (3 December)
Part II: Structuralization (4 December)

What are the things we all need to think about in order to understand phonological change...?

Selected Conference Presentations by Ranjan Sen

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The palatalization of alveolar consonants before LME /u:/ is still variable and diffusing in PDE.... more The palatalization of alveolar consonants before LME /u:/ is still variable and diffusing in PDE. The OED gives several pronunciations for mature: e.g. /məˈtʃʊə ~ məˈtjʊə/, but provides only unpalatalized (/dj tj/) transcriptions for endure, tune, and duke, despite the common occurrence of palatalized (and yod-dropped) variants in many varieties of British English. Extensive variability is not recent in origin, and we can already detect relevant patterns in the eighteenth century from the evidence of a range of pronouncing dictionaries, e.g. Beal (1996, 1999) notes a tendency for northern English and Scottish authors to be more conservative. She concludes that we require ‘a comprehensive survey of the many pronouncing dictionaries and other works on pronunciation’ (1996: 379) to gain more insight into the historical variation patterns underlying PDE.
This paper presents preliminary results from such a ‘comprehensive survey’: the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology database (ECEP). Transcriptions of palatalization keywords are compared across a range of eighteenth-century sources in order to determine the internal (e.g. stress, voice, word-position) and external (e.g. prescriptive, geographical, social) motivations for the presence or absence of palatalization. The greater abundance of contextual and sociolinguistic evidence available for these later periods tends to present a fascinating, complex picture.

References
Beal, Joan C. 1996. ‘The Jocks and the Geordies: Modified Standards in Eighteenth-century Pronouncing Dictionaries’ in David Britton (ed.)Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 135. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 363-382.
Beal, Joan C. 1999. English Pronunciaton in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence’s ‘Grand Repository of the English Language’ (1775). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Beal, Joan C. 2012 ‘“Can’t see the wood for the trees?” Corpora and the study of Late Modern English’,in Markus, M, Y Iyeiri and R. Heuberger (eds.) Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics: a Multi-dimensional Approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 13-30.
Dobson, Eric J. 1956. English Pronunciation 1500-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Pre-Classical Prevarication in Latin Feet: Stratal synchronic structure and discretionary diachro... more Pre-Classical Prevarication in Latin Feet: Stratal synchronic structure and discretionary diachronic development
Ranjan Sen, University of Sheffield, UK
The insights of both stratal and optimality-theoretic aspects of Stratal OT (e.g. Bermúdez-Otero 2006) make significant progress towards illuminating the nearly 150-year-old problem of ‘iambic shortening’ in Latin (light-heavy = LH → light-light = LL, where H is heavy by either vowel length or closure). The philological tradition (e.g. Müller 1869, Lindsay 1894, Drexler 1969, Questa 2007, Fortson 2008) focuses upon the likelihood of this optional early Latin phenomenon occurring in different locations within the verse line – considering rhythmical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic factors with impressive results – but the precise synchronic metrical conditions of the process are not a concern. Conversely, the phonological tradition has identified necessary structural conditions, but a metrical structure sufficient to account for all sub-types of the phenomenon remains elusive, e.g. Mester (1994) and Prince & Smolensky ((1993)2004) do not attempt to cover the phrasal data, and Jacobs (2003), despite recognising required constraints, contains inaccuracies (e.g. the conflation of chronologically disparate phenomena) and ensuing analytical difficulties. A major problem remains that the same single-level phonology cannot account for both iambic shortening and the correct assignment of the well-known (ante)penultimate Latin word stress.
A solution emerges from the observations that (1) iambic shortening (e.g. légoː → légo ‘I choose’) may occur across certain word boundaries (e.g. se.d ŏs.ten.de.re ‘but to show’) and is sensitive to sentence stress (occurring only in unstressed elements, commonly function words; Fortson 2008: 177), and that (2) cretic shortening (e.g. dícitoː → díːcito ‘let him say’) and word-initial iambic shortening (e.g. voluptáːtem → volŭptáːtem ‘desire (acc.)’ only before a stressed syllable) must, we demonstrate for Latin (contra Prince & Smolensky 1993: 69-71), be triggered after lexical stress has been assigned. They are post-lexical developments which (i) are sensitive to stress clashes at the word level (CLASH » WSP), (ii) retain word-level metrical structure assigning primary stress at the phrase level (MAX-FOOTHEAD, FTBIN » PARSE-σ, WSP), and (iii) place greater emphasis on parsing syllables into feet and avoiding non-head heavy syllables at the phrase level, repairing by lightening (PARSE-σ, WSP » NONF » MAX-µ). We present new Optimality-Theoretic analyses, crucially different from earlier attempts to ensure correct stress assignment and the restriction of shortening to accurate contexts, where the interaction of the same constraints differs at word-level (NONF » FTBIN, CLASH, MAX-µ » WSP » PARSE-σ) and phrase-level (MAX-FTHD, FTBIN, » PARSE-σ, WSP » NONF, CLASH, MAX-µ).
Furthermore, we demonstrate that the shortenings are sensitive not only to stratal computational procedure, but also prosodic representational structure (a distinction discussed by Bermúdez-Otero & Luís 2009). Iambic shortening occurs in words within a phonological phrase which do not bear sentence stress, e.g. (quo.d ăc).(ceː).(pis).(tiː) ‘that you received’ (Plautus Trinummus 964), and never when followed by a ‘full word boundary’, as at the end of a clause, where the phrase conceivably bore main stress (Fortson 2008: 187). The influence of morphosyntax on phonological phrase formation – such as focus-marking, MATCH/ALIGN (XP, φ) (e.g. Truckenbrodt 2007, Selkirk 2011) – explains the philologists’ observations on the sensitivity of iambic shortening to syntax/discourse-structure, e.g. focused elements do not undergo shortening as they bear sentence stress.
Finally, in the later period of classical Latin, productive iambic shortening is mostly restricted to single disyllabic words, becoming lexicalised in a handful of items (e.g. beneː > bene ‘well’). The shrinking of the relevant domain (phrase → word) is precisely the prediction of Stratal OT’s model of the life-cycle of phonological processes, where low-level phonetic effects may become phonologised at the phrase-level, then word-level and stem-level, and ultimately lexicalised (e.g. Bermúdez-Otero 2006).
References
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. (2006). ‘Phonological change in Optimality Theory’, in Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed. Oxford: Elsevier, 9: 497-505.
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo & Luís, Ana R. (2009). ‘Cyclic domains and prosodic spans in the phonology of European Portuguese functional morphs’. Paper presented at OCP6, Edinburgh, 24 January 2009.
Drexler, Hans. (1969). Die Iambenkürzung. Hildesheim: Olms.
Fortson IV, Benjamin W. (2008). Language and Rhythm in Plautus. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Jacobs, Haike. (2003). ‘The emergence of quantity-sensitivity in Latin: secondary stress, iambic shortening, and theoretical implications for “mixed” stress systems’, in D. Eric Holt (ed.), Optimality Theory and Language Change. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 229-247.
Lindsay, Wallace M. (1894). The Latin Language: an historical account of Latin sounds, stems, and flexions. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mester, R. Armin. (1994). ‘The quantitative trochee in Latin’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 12: 1-61.
Müller, C. F. W. (1869). Plautinische Prosodie. Berlin: Weidmann.
Prince, Alan S. & Paul Smolensky. ((1993) 2004). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell. (Rutgers Optimality Archive 537. Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science Technical Report 2).
Questa, Cesare. (2007). La metrica di Plauto e Terenzio. Urbino: QuattroVenti.
Selkirk, Elisabeth. (2011). ‘The syntax-phonology interface’, in John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle & Alan Yu (eds.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 435-484.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. (2007). ‘The syntax-phonology interface’, in Paul de Lacy (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 435-456.

The book will appeal to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonology, Classical philology, and Indo-European linguistics.

Readership: Graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, particularly those focusing on phonology, and in Romance, Classical, and Indo-European linguistics.

Keywords: Latin, historical phonology, syllable, dark /l/, compensatory lengthening, stop + liquid, vowel reduction, epenthesis, assimilation, sound change.