Fenyvesi, Anna and Gyula Zsigri. 2011. The adaptation of English initial unstressed syllables in American Hungarian loans: Theoretical implications. Americana (e-journal), vol. 7 special linguistic issue, http://americanaejournal.hu/vol7ling/fenyvesi-zsigri. (original) (raw)
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Linguistic Typology, 25(2), 389-400. doi: 10.1515/lingty-2020-2066, 2020
Although this book was published in the "Studies in Laboratory Phonology" series, you will find hardly any laboratory phonology in it. Instead, you will discover plenty of excellent phonological typology intertwined with historical phonologyprobably a much rarer find. Until very recently, phonological typology was only marginally present within mainstream linguistic typology, being barely recognised as a subfield in its own right. The last few years have seen a gradual change: two synthesising volumes, both entitled Phonological Typology, have appeared (Gordon 2016; Hyman and Plank 2018) and the first workshop on this topic was held at ALT 2019 (Grossman and Moran 2019). At that meeting, the very first Greenberg Award (a prize of the Association for Linguistic Typology for outstanding typological dissertations) was given out in phonologyand it went to the thesis on which the present book is based. The task of reviewing the resulting volume is both pleasant and challenging: this open-access volume appears as a new landmark in typological studies on syllable structure and a sine qua non for future research in the field.
This paper examines one aspect of the phonological adaptation of American English loanwords in two contact varieties, American Hungarian and American Finnish, namely, the fate of unstressed initial syllables of borrowed English words. The two recipient languages both have initial word stress, which is retained in their respective immigrant varieties. American Hungarian and American Finnish exhibit striking similarities in their strategies of adaptation: either (1) the stress is moved to the first syllable (just like in the Old World varieties of these languages), or (2) the unstressed initial syllable is deleted. In this analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory, the role of perception is argued to be crucial in explaining the presence of the two parallel strategies of adaptation. In the perception of word boundaries, Strategy 2 relies exclusively on auditory (rather than visual) input, where the word boundary is perceived as marked through stress by the speakers of the immigrant varieties. * The authors would like to thank, for valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the paper, Pekka Hirvonen and the audience of the 2nd workshop on Finno-Ugric Languages in Contact with English at Methods XII, University of New Brunswick, Canada, 2005, as well as two anonymous referees for SKY Journal of Linguistics. Any remaining shortcomings are ours. ANNA FENYVESI AND GYULA ZSIGRI 132 syllable (just like it would be in the Old World varieties of these languages as well, cf. Hungary Hungarian [HH] 'konverter and Finland Finnish [FF]
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2006
Yet another book about the syllable, one could say. Still, the editors convincingly argue that the book fills a lacuna by providing a systematic treatment and evaluation of the role of the syllable in the most popular modern phonological framework-Optimality Theory. The volume is a collection of fifteen chapters grouped into five parts, each dealing with a different aspect of syllable-based phonology. Part One, 'Introduction', prepared by the editors, is an excellent, short but comprehensive, overview of the problems the book will be concerned with. Part Two, 'Syllable structure and prosodic structure' (four chapters), deals with weight issues. The five chapters of Part Three, 'Nonmoraic syllables and syllable edges', treat the notorious 'unsyllabifiable' segments. Part Four, 'Segments and syllables', includes four chapters on the segmental structure of syllables, and finally, Part Five, 'How concrete is phonotaxis?', provides an apparent anticlimax with a chapter proposing syllable-independent phonotactics. Féry & van de Vijver emphasise the mutual benefit relation between the syllable and Optimality Theory (OT): while OT sheds new light on old syllable-related issues, the syllable allows OT to make valid phonological generalisations. For instance, they show that OT is able to account for syllable typology by means of its markedness and faithfulness constraints rather than by means of rules and rule conspiracies. The universally predictable implicational hierarchy of syllable structures can be explained as a result of the interaction (shown via ranking) among the constraints. If markedness constraints (like ONSET and NOCODA) fully dominate faithfulness constraints (e.g. a constraint against deletion and against epenthesis), we obtain the most unmarked syllable type, namely CV. The authors claim that the advantage of the OT explanation as opposed to the 'conspiracy of rules' explanation lies in the fact that while the rules 'do not know' their own ultimate function (e.g. hiatus avoidance, which may be obtained either via consonant epenthesis or vowel deletion), constraints always rank with reference to this ultimate function (i.e. faithfulness constraints with reference to markedness constraints). This advantage granted, it is worth remembering that Natural Phonology in both its earlier and later facets has advocated a functional account of phonological structures by means of either (earlier) simultaneous ordered application of universal natural processes or (later) preference hierarchies (compare markedness constraints) and semiotic principles (compare faithfulness constraints). The Swabian example (9) is easily handled by a processbased interpretation (bi[s]t → bi[S]t → bi[S]). Incidentally, the authors state that 'in Hawaiian, hiatus is freely allowed' (5), which is disputable. In fact, certain combinations of two vowels in Hawaiian are pronounced as one-syllable diphthongs (cf. Schütz 1995: 18), and diphthongisation is certainly one of the hiatus-avoidance strategies. The syllable as a prosodic constituent is a leitmotif of Part Two. In 'Sympathy, cumulativity, and the Duke-of-York gambit' John J. McCarthy replaces the opaque Duke-of-York derivation in Bedouin Arabic (/ÁkAlAt → /kÁlAt → /AkÁlAt) with the improved sympathy theory account, in which the notion of cumulativity is employed. While in a Duke-of-York derivation, 'later steps do not accumulate the results of earlier steps' (25), in non-Duke-of-York derivations exactly this happens. In this way, the intermediate steps are not vacuous/opaque any more. The clear advantage of this analysis over the rule-based analysis is that it is transparent. However, the apparatus for comparing and evaluating unfaithful mappings is very complex, while in the case of Duke-of-York derivations usually one intermediate-stage
Prosodically-conditioned syllable structure in English
Research in Language , 2019
This paper investigates the interplay between the metrical structure and phonotactic complexity in English, a language with lexical stress and an elaborate inventory of consonant clusters. The analysis of a dictionary-and corpus-based list of polysyllabic words leads to two major observations. First, there is a tendency for onsetful syllables to attract stress, and for onsetless syllables to repel it. Second, the stressed syllable embraces a greater array of consonant clusters than unstressed syllables. Moreover, the farther form the main stress, the less likely the unstressed syllable is to contain a complex onset. This finding indicates that the ability of a position to license complex onsets is related to its distance from the prosodic head.
The role of prosody in morphologically governed phonotactic regularities
2002
My central concern in this paper is whether restrictions on segment sequencing necessarily mirror prosodically motivated segment distribution. The role of prosody in capturing the distributional regularities may well be less than straightforward in cases of abundant interactions with morphology. One such case, found in Serbian (Neo-štokavian dialect), is the focus of the present study. After addressing issues of syllabicity, I turn to syllable weight, focusing on presonorant lengthening: vowel lengthening in syllables closed with a sonorant, encountered only at certain morphological junctures. I present two analyses of presonorant lengthening. One provides prosodic motivation for this process but depends on a baroque set of opaque constraint interactions. The other interprets presonorant lengthening as a static phonotactic regularity, and includes only transparent constraint interactions. The former analysis has a considerable advantage over its alternative because of its straightfo...