There is no such thing as [voice]
Blue = issues with Laryngeal Realism Yellow = what’s the alternative?
Geoff Schwartz (
[email protected]) – UAM Poznań Supported by the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki): grant # UMO-2016/21/B/HS2/00610
1. Laryngeal Realism (LR) and its problems
1. Onset Prominence (OP) representations (Schwartz 2010 et seq.)
a. The Basics
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In OP, ‘segments’ are derived from a hierarchy of phonetic events (left)
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Manner is structural, place and laryngeal features attach to those structures (center)
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Place in stops is assigned to Closure, and ‘trickles’ to occupy Noise and VO (right)
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two privative specifications ([sg], [voice]) claimed to reflect 3 categories of voice onset time (VOT): long-lag, short-lag, lead (pre-voicing) Short VOT (plain voiceless) assumed to be unspecified, ‘unmarked’ typologically, and phonologically inactive Lead VOT = [vce]; v-less aspirated = [sg]; breathy voiced = both
b. Unresolved issues for LR i. Systemic variability and change •
Swedish (Helgason & Ringen 2008): both pre-voicing and aspiration
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English (Morris & Hunnicutt 2016): pre-voicing in some dialects
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Italian (Huszthy 2016), Polish (Jocz 2016): aspiration in some dialects Afrikaans (Coetzee et al. 2014): f0 taking over from VOT, tonogenesis
LR doesn‘t have much to say about such cases
2. OP Laryngeal phonology – basic configurations •
Place (in stops) must be assigned to Closure, but laryngeal features are flexible
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VOT typology a function of the level of [sg] assignment
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Three possible systems for two-series languages
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Aspiration is [sg] on Noise (left and center); no aspiration with VO-level [sg] (sg)
ii. Voiceless active in voicing languages? •
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Wetzels & Mascaró (2001): evidence for active [-voice] in a number of voicing languages (Yiddish, Romanian, Croatian/Serbian, Polish) Vaux & Samuels (2005) argue that plain voiceless is marked
iii. Voiced inactive in voicing languages? •
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Pre-voicing is often absent but this does not ensure voiceless percepts (van Alphen & Smits 2004 for Dutch; Schwartz et al. 2017 for Polish). Despite predictions of LR (Beckman et al. 2013), intervocalic passive voicing is common in voice languages (Hualde et al. 2011 for Spanish; Hualde & Nadeu 2011 for Italian). Here’s an example from Polish
Empirical implications •
VOT categories captured, but with room for variability and change •
Two types of aspiration systems possible (English vs. Icelandic)
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Voiceless is phonologically active in ‘voicing’ languages
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/bdg/ are phonologically equivalent across laryngeal system types
3. Assimilation and neutralization? •
In voicing languages, non-prevocalic VO may be reconstructed, usually maintaining contrast, or eliminated, resulting in neutralization and assimilation (left) •
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Nothing ‘spreads’. Regressive voicing is part of the carrier, unmodulated by any laryngeal feature in the cluster. Devoicing is the loss of a bare VO that was voiced by default
In aspiration languages (right), neutralization is predicted to be IMPOSSIBLE, since even without VO, there is still Closure and Noise level [sg] to make contrast
If there is TETU in L2 acquisition, and L1 Polish speakers transfer prevoicing into L2 English (they do), then voiced in Polish cannot be marked [sg] apparently involves category boundary between short and long lag VOT, but no contrasts between short and long VOT lead (implosives?)
2. Why doesn’t Laryngeal Realism work? a. Because it’s based on the ‘segment’!! •
4. Manner asymmetries in OP laryngeal phonology The auditory structure of stops is comprised of 3 phonetic events: closure, release burst, CV transition. Stops are not ‘segments’!
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CV transition is voiced by default, while closure and noise hinder voicing We can’t that a stop by default should be voiced or voiceless. It depends on which phase of the stop we’re talking about LR is guilty of ‘phone idealization’ Ladd (2011): the mistaken assumption that segmental symbols provide a faithful representation of speech.
Except across morpheme boundaries, progressive laryngeal assimilation is limited to cases where C1 is voiceless and C2 is a fricative (Wetzels & Macaró 2001) •
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In OP, stop+fricative clusters may be joined into a single tree. If they are, both /tv/ and /df/ will surface as [tf] (below left)
Turkish: final neutralization for stops but not fricatives •
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Fricatives may have Noise-level [sg] assignment (as opposed to VO-level for stops), reflecting the fact that fricatives have stronger internal cues than stops (Wright 2004) This gives us the Turkish pattern (below right)
b. Because there’s no such thing as [voice] Modulation Theory (Traunmüller 1994) •
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Linguistic content (i.e. phonological representations) encoded as modulations on a carrier signal The carrier bears personal and affective information about the speaker – it must be voiced If the carrier is voiced, voicing cannot represent a true modulation. [sg] (or [fortis]) is the only specification, regardless of language type
Top 3 tweets from this Poster #Modulation Theory & #Onset Prominence solve problems with #Laryngeal Realism
Thanks for stopping by Take a handout. I anticipate some questions, try to answer them, and give references
There is #NO[voice], voicing is a bare #VO node, part of an unmodulated carrier @Phonologists, stop taking the #segment for granted, but stilll be #phonologists!
