Natural Phonology: Universal principles for the study of language (insiders meet outsiders.) (original) (raw)

Phonology, Naturalness and Universals

2007

This paper briefly surveys several conceptions of naturalness in phonology, touching primarily on typological frequency and the notion of 'phonetic motivation'. It is argued that typological frequency is not a reliable indicator of what is 'phonetically motivated' as relative frequency patterns are the outcomes of more complex interactions including non-phonetic factors. Phonetic motivations are diverse and include random variations, n o t only deterministic results, as is often desired. Models that view phonological patterns as emerging from complex interactions of a variety of natural factors are the most satisfying.

On formal universals in phonology

2009

Abstract Understanding the universal aspects of human language structure requires comparison at multiple levels of analysis. While Evans & Levinson (E&L) focus mostly on substantive variation in language, equally revealing insights can come from studying formal universals. I first discuss how Artificial Grammar Experiments can test universal preferences for certain types of abstract phonological generalizations over others.

Deriving and Implicational Universal in Two Theories of Phonology

1995

* This paper is very much a work in progress. It represents the latest version of a paper I delivered at NELS 26 (Harvard/Mil). I am grateful participants in this conference as well as in the Tilburg conference on the Derivational Residue in Phonology for helpful discussion. My thesis advisors Mark Hale and Hoskuldur Thciinsson, as well as Morris Halle, Madelyn Kissack and Andrea Calabrese have been discussing these ideas with me for over a year. I am responsible for all errors.

Universals, Their Violation and the Notion of Phonologically Pe culiar Languages

A language can be said to be "peculiar" if it violates a universal pattern that admits only very few exceptions. In the paper, we propose a typology of phonological peculiarities concerning the content of segment inventories, and deal in detail with one of these types. The type involves the illegitimate absence of a segment that an implicational universal predicts should actually be present in the segment inventory of a language. A computer program retrieved 33 phonological peculiarities of this type in the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID), comprising 451 languages. It turned out that 391 of these languages had no peculiarity of the type studied, 43 had one, and 17 more than one peculiarity. Some observations are made regarding the last category of 17 "strongly peculiar" languages. In particular, it is shown that despite their strong phonological idiosyncrasy, the peculiar languages have only a limited variability in that they cannot violate more than six universals or have more than three distinct segments lacking.

On the question of linguistic universals

The Linguistic Review, 2000

This article offers a general discussion of the concept of universals in linguistics (and in general), spelling out different ways of understanding claims to universality and connecting such claims to other (often familiar) related distinctions, terminology and approaches such as competence and performance or I-language and E-language, evolutionary explanations, deep and surface universals, rationalism and empiricism or nature and nurture, realism and nominalism, parametric variation and tendencies, formal and functional approaches, properties or explanations, historical explanations, modularity and structural analogy, so-called meta patterns and minimalism.

Phonology in Universal Grammar

The Oxford Handbooks of Universal Grammar, 2017

In order to investigate the phonological component of Universal Grammar (UG), we must first clarify what exactly the concept of UG involves. 1 The terms 'Universal Grammar' and 'Language Acquisition Device' (LAD) are often treated as synonymous, 2 but we believe that it is important to distinguish between the two. We take a grammar to be a computational system that transduces conceptual-intentional representations into linear (but multidimensional) strings of symbols to be interpreted by the various physical systems employed to externalize linguistic messages. It thus includes the traditional syntactic, morphological, and phonological components, but not phonetics, which converts the categorical symbols output by the grammar into gradient representations implementable by the body. Bearing the above definition of 'grammar' in mind, we take 'Universal Grammar' to refer specifically to the initial state of this computational system that all normal humans bring to the task of learning their first language (cf. Hale and Reiss 2008:2; and chapters 5, 10, and 12). The phonological component of this initial state may contain, inter alia, rules (the 'processes' of Natural Phonology Stampe 1979), violable constraints (as in Calabrese's 1988, 1995 marking statements or Optimality Theory (OT)'s markedness and

Deletion or epenthesis? On the falsifiability of phonological universals

This paper presents a revised typology of consonant epenthesis and explores the theoretical implications of such a typology. Through careful re-analysis, the basis for a proposed universal of coronal preference and dorsal avoidance is shown to be lacking in evidential support. In fact, epenthesis as a verifiable phenomenon-and not just a theory-internal label-is called into question once careful attention is paid to the issue of choosing between epenthesis and deletion as competing analyses of the same data. The ambiguity between multiple possible analyses, and the lack of formal transformations (from 'data' to 'evidence') are shown to be general problems within phonological theory. Phonological 'universals' can be invoked to arbitrate between competing analyses, but when the typological evidence for those 'universals' is derived from the same data, a problem of circularity arises. In order to break this closed loop, a quantitative evaluation metric is proposed that is theory-independent with regards to substantive universals. This metric is essentially a statistical threshold for learnability (itself empirically testable) that allows for independent testing of certain theoretical claims.

Natural Phonology as Part of Natural Linguistics

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2009

In the history of phonology, no model of phonology (e.g. Trubetzkoy's model or Optimality Theory) has stayed for any considerable time alone on its own, i.e. without parallel models of syntax and morphology. Thus, Stampean Natural Phonology has been complemented in Europe by Natural Morphology, Natural Syntax and Natural Text Linguistics. In this way, Natural Phonology can be integrated into an overall model of Natural Linguistics. This model has been further unified by giving it the status of a preference theory and by providing functionalist epistemology and a semiotic metatheory for all of its parts, including Natural Phonology. This unity of Natural Linguistics is demonstrated with the universal preference parameters of figure vs. ground sharpening, binarity, iconicity, indexicality and the naturalness scale biuniqueness > uniqueness > ambiguity. The final argumentation focuses on the "weak claim" of universality of preferences (against the "strong claim" of innate phonological processes) by understanding universal preferences (including phonological processes) as plausible constructivist "software" strategies which are constructed in language acquisition for overcoming universal innate "hardware" problems.

Phonology without universal grammar

Frontiers in Psychology, 2015

The question of identifying the properties of language that are specific human linguistic abilities, i.e., Universal Grammar, lies at the center of linguistic research. This paper argues for a largely Emergent Grammar in phonology, taking as the starting point that memory, categorization, attention to frequency, and the creation of symbolic systems are all nonlinguistic characteristics of the human mind. The articulation patterns of American English rhotics illustrate categorization and systems; the distribution of vowels in Bantu vowel harmony uses frequencies of particular sequences to argue against Universal Grammar and in favor of Emergent Grammar; prefix allomorphy in Esimbi illustrates the Emergent symbolic system integrating phonological and morphological generalizations. The Esimbi case has been treated as an example of phonological opacity in a Universal Grammar account; the Emergent analysis resolves the pattern without opacity concerns.