What's wrong with vowel-initial syllables (original) (raw)
Related papers
Vowel-zero alternations in Government Phonology and Strict CV Theory
Studi e saggi linguistici, 2019
According to strict CV syllable theory, all coda-onset clusters are CVC sequences, where V is an empty nucleus. This hypothesis sharply distinguishes Strict CV from other autosegmental theories and has significant consequences on a theory of empty categories. In particular, the CVCV representation of 'vowel-zero' alternations must distinguish between two kinds of empty nuclei, the invisible one, contained in coda-onset clusters, and the one that surfaces in alternation sites. By looking at the 'syncope-epenthesis' phenomena of Emilian Italian dialects, this paper argues that such distinction is not empirically well founded and defends a more restrictive hypothesis about empty nuclei.
Phonology, 2012
Goldsmith's (1995) Handbook of phonological theory provided an influential overview of the field in the mid-90s, earning a well-deserved place on the shelf of practising phonologists. The volume under review is not the first to attempt to update this classic work. Two other recent handbooks of comparable length and scope are the second edition of Goldsmith (Goldsmith et al. 2011), and de Lacy's (2007) well-received Cambridge handbook of phonology. Besides evaluating how well the current work meets the general expectations that readers have for a handbook, this review must necessarily also address the inevitable questions : why yet another handbook of phonology just now ? ; how does this volume distinguish itself from its competitors ? ; does this work fill a gap that is not met by the other handbooks ? The names of the editors and authors provide the first clue to what makes this volume distinctive. Almost all contributors work and/or received their PhDs in Europe, whereas North American phonologists dominate the other handbooks. The European perspective is felt in several of the core chapters in the second and longest part of the volume, ' Research issues ', which discuss certain approaches-such as Element Theory, Government Phonology and CV theory-that tend to be less well known in North America. The chapter by Botma, Kula & Nasukawa on ' Features' has a comprehensive discussion of the phonetic motivation for different feature theories in early generative phonology, followed by a clear introduction to Element Theory. One of the distinctive properties of Element Theory is that the same feature can have different phonetic realisations, depending on the featural configuration (in particular, which other feature is the head of the configuration). The advantages of representing voicing and nasality with a single feature are exemplified with a detailed analysis of alternations involving nasal prefixes in Zoque. Péter Szigetvári's chapter on ' Syllables ' follows a critical historical survey of motivations for syllable structure with an exceptionally clear introduction to CV theory, a theory which essentially dispenses with the syllable as a constituent. As someone who was not trained in this approach, I read the chapter with scepticism. However, by the end of it I felt I had an appreciative understanding of how strict CV licensing can account for classic problems like restrictions on consonant and vowel clusters which are usually considered motivations for syllable structure. Both this chapter and the one on features will be read with interest by phonologists wishing to understand the highlighted theories better. They will surely be recommended to students as useful introductory chapters by phonologists working in the theories presented. However, as the focus in these chapters is on the particular theories under discussion, they are not intended to provide a useful guide to current research and issues in other frameworks.
Language, 2000
Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Dr. W.A. Wagenaar, hoogleraar in de faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op donderdag 10 september 1998 te klokke 16.15 uur door Robertus Wilhelmus Nicolaas Goedemans geboren te Haarlem in 1967 1 Rhymes and moras, which will be introduced later, are even smaller prosodic units. Rhymes will be argued later to replace the syllable as the prosodic unit that is the domain in certain phonological processes, and moras do not dominate strings of segments but rather single segments. However, see van Heuven (1994) on the possibility of single segments acting as prosodic domains in general. * Using this kind of structure meant that he could refer to the syllable as a unit, while in the same effort resolving the, at that time still troublesome, ambisyllabicity problem. This problem involves segments that phonologically belong to the two syllables between which they are CHAPTER 1 6 4 The bars over some of the vowels in (4) indicate length. phonotactic co-occurrence restrictions between them that do not hold between the other subsyllabic parts. A notorious example of such a restriction is the impossibility of the sequence "long vowel-velar nasal". Combinations like [o ], [i ] and [a ] are ill-formed in a large number of languages. Another argument for the constituency of nucleus and coda is of a more phonetic nature. A long history of experiments shows that there is a temporal relation between a vowel and a following consonant in a large number of languages (cf. Peterson & Lehiste 1960; Chen 1970). The experiments reveal some sort of "trade-off " relation between the nucleus and the coda, but not between the nucleus and the onset. For instance, long vowels are often followed by short consonants and short vowels by long consonants, and voiced consonants are preceded by longer vowels than voiceless consonants (cf. English bed vs. bet). These observations show that the durations of the nucleus and coda are interrelated. Following Lehiste's (1971) assumption that such temporal relationships between two segments reflect programming as a unit at some higher level, we insert a node called the rhyme under the syllable node (cf. Fudge 1969; Selkirk 1978). This new node dominates the nucleus and the coda, which results in the syllabic structure presented in (3). (3) σ Onset Rhyme Nucleus Coda st a nd Not only does this rhyme unit indicate which group of segments must be identical when we create two rhyming lines of a poem, it is also very useful in many phonological rules. An example of such a rule is provided by Lass (1984). He states that, in Old English noun declensions, the onset-rhyme division is needed to account for the presence of a suffix. Let us look at some of Lass' data. 4 (4) a. Neuter a-stem, nom pl : col-u 'coals' word 'words' lim-u 'limbs' wīf 'women' 1.2.1 Stress: an introduction to the phenomenon Sweet (1902:47) defines force (or stress) by the effort with which breath is expelled from the lungs. He identifies 'loudness' as the acoustic correlate of stress. There is a, perhaps not so obvious, discrepancy between Sweet's definition of stress and his acoustic correlate. The effort with which breath is expelled is definitely speaker oriented, while loudness is a perceptually (read 'for the listener') defined property of speech that is correlated with the intensity of the speech signal. 5 This is probably what Jones (1950) had in mind when he introduced the distinction between stress (speaker activity) and prominence (effect perceived by the listener). 1 The experiments reported on in this chapter have been published in Goedemans & van Heuven (1993).
2011
The CVX theory of syllable by S. Duanmu claims that the maximal rhyme size in all languages is VX, i.e. VV or VC (Duanmu 2009). Duanmu's analysis of wordfinal rhymes in English shows that all coda clusters form a complex sound or can be explained by morphology. Long vowels can be represented as short and thus the rhyme size does not exceed VX. The data from Slovak cast doubts on the universal nature of the CVX syllable theory. In Slovak, word-final consonant clusters form complex sounds only rarely and not all consonants beyond the VX limit have morphological solution. Moreover, the dominant feature of Slovak vowels is their length, which expands the number of timing slots in the rhyme structure template.