VOWEL FEATURES, PAIRED VARIABLES, AND THE ...

VOWEL FEATURES, PAIRED VARIABLES,

AND THE ENGLISH VOWEL SHIFT

WILLIAMS-Y. WANG

University of California, Berkeley

I n this study the use of variables for the abbreviation of disjunctive sets of phonological rules is examined. We ask whether there are rule sets which require more than one variable, and answer the question in the affirmative. The evidence consists of a new formulation of the English vowel-shift rule, using a pair of asymmetric features which distinguish four tongue heights for vowels. Within the context of the proposed rule, several theoretical issues concerning rule formalism and phonological change are discussed.

Variables as an abbreviatory device in the specification of phonological features were introduced by Morris Halle (1962a) for treating assimi1ation.l The usefulness of this device has been demonstrated beyond doubt in recent works on linguistic theory. If a segment A influences segment B, it is almost always the case that the specification for some feature F in B is changed to agree with the specification of the same feature in A. It is this simple yet fundamental truth about language that a variable captures neatly in phonological rules. 1.1. Some rules contain several variables. For example, consider the common phenomenon of nasals assimilating to the place of articulation of the following obstruent. Suppose that the phonological features which classify place of articulation are F1 , Fz , and F3 . Then a rule which formalizes this phenomenon is the following :

Phonological rules may be expanded into elementary rules of the form X-+Y, where neither X nor Y contains any abbreviatory devices. Rule (1) expands into a set of eight elementary rules, since there are three variables and each variable can assume two values, plus or minus. Thus, (2) is an elementary rule contained in (I):

1.2. To see the relations that hold among the eight elementary rules contained in (I), and the relations that hold between (1) and other types of rules that in1 Work presented in this paper was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant GS1430. I wish to thank Niels Ege, Richard Stanley, Betty Shefts Chang, and Karl Zimmer for discussion of this paper.

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volve the use of variables, it is necessary to discuss briefly some basic conventions of rule applicati~n.~ Given a set of phonological rules and an arbitrary input, the output of the rules may or may not vary according to how the rules are applied. If the set contains n rules, then there are n! sequences in which the rules can apply. We say that the set of rules is UNORDERED if and only if all possible sequences of application yield the same output. Otherwise, the rules are ORDERED. I t s e e m that differences in output which are due to differences in rule ordering are always contrastive, i.e. not in free variation. Therefore, when a set of rules is ordered, the linguist must state the particular sequence that is required to yield the correct output. When conjunctive, The rules in a set may be CONJUNCTIVE or DISJUNCTIVE. if the set is ordered, and each rule each rule applies to the output of earlier rules applies directly to the input of the set if the set is unordered. When the set is disjunctive, an input element may be changed not more than once by the rules in the set. For ordered rules, this change will be effected by the earliest applicable rule in the specified sequence. For unordered rules, no element can be changed more than once by rules in the set. The distinction, then, is that a set of conjunctive rules can change an input element more than once, whereas a set of disjunctive rules cannot change an input element more than once. All four types of rule sets are found in phonological descriptions. 1.3. Returning now to rule (I), we see that the set of eight elementary rules it contains are conjunctive, i.e. they can apply more than once to the same input element, 11-hichin this case is a nasal segment. The set is unordered: there are 8! different sequences available in the application of the elementary rules, but the output mould be the same in each case. The reason, of course, is that there is no intersection in the contexts in which the nasal segment is to be changed, since the resulting nasals are in complementary distribution with respect to the following ohstruents. Rules like (1) do not really provide very strong evidence to demonstrate that multiple-variable rules are necessary in phonology. I t is an interesting question for the study of formal universals in phonology to ask if more compelling evidence can be found for the use of multiple-variable rules. As opposed to conjunctive sets, which are typical and run throughout individual phonologies, disjunctive sets form self-contained units which are relatively independent of the other rules in their operation. Ordered disjunctive sets of elementary rules are abbreviated by the parenthesis convention; they do not concern us here. Unordered disjunctive sets are abbreviated by variables. If me can find disjunctive sets which require more than one variable for their abbreviation, that will be more convincing proof that multiple-variable rules are motivated in phonology. A set of elementary rules is disjunctive (and unordered) if the rule which abbreviates these rules contains a variable on a feature that is to be changed. A typical case is that of the tonal flipflop found in the Chhozhoa dialect of Chinese.3 For fuller discussions on these problems of phonological formalism, see Chafe 1968, Postal 1968, Stanley 1968, and especially Johnson 1968. This rule is discussed in greater detail in Wang 1967a:lOZ.

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There, we have a rule of the form (3) which is an abbreviation of the elementary rules (4) and (5). But (4) and (5) are disjunctive in that the application of one precludes that of the other. (3) [ahigh] -+ [-ahigh] (4) [+high] -+ [-high] (5) [-high] 4 [+high] Applying the elementary rules in the sequence (4-5) would change all relevant tones to [+high]. Applying them in the sequence ( 5 4 ) would yield only [-high] tones. The desired result, however, is that [+high] tones become [-high] while [-high] tones become [+high]. The difficulty is that the output of one rule is changed back by the other rule in the set. To avoid this difficulty we could posit some detour element, say D. One of the tones can be temporarily changed into D to avoid the merger that (4) or (5) would produce. The detour method is difficult to justify in most cases, where the element D has no independent reality. The natural solution to this problem is to consider (4) and (5) disjunctive, and abbreviate them into (3) by means of a variable. The difference between rule (1) and rule (3) is a significant one. In (1) the specifications for the features F1, F2, and F3 in the input nasal segment are irrelevant, whereas in (3) the specification for the feature [high] in the input tone DETERMINES that of the output tone. We will be concerned with rules like (3) rather than (I), since in rules like (3) variables are significantly used to capture the unique characteristics of disjunctive sets. Within the binary framework that tve are assuming, where a feature is specified either plus or minus at the morphophonemic level, one variable on one feature can state only the relationship between two segments (or tones). To motivate the use of additional variables, we must look at cases where the phonological relation is among more than two segments. 1.4. Some types of three-way relations can also be described by a single variable. Thus, consider the situation where a segment S1 changes into S2 and S2 changes into S3, and Sz is different from S1 and S3by one feature each. The relevant factors, then, are as illustrated in Table 1. SEGMENTS FEATURES F1

Fz

81

S2

f

-

-

8 3

-

+

Although here the relation is among three segments, it can nevertheless be formulated in a rule that uses only one variable by attaching the variable to different features on the two sides of the arrow, as follows:

We have an example of this situation in Danish, where in certain environments

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/t/ becomes /$/ and /$/ becomes /Wa4F1 here is the feature [tense] and Fz is [continuant]. The two rules (7) and (8) are disjunctively ordered and can be abbreviated into (6). The crucial fact here which makes it sufficient to use only one variable is that, although there are three elements, only two changes are involved.

Until recently, the only phonological rule I could find that required the significant use of two variables was the tone circle in Amoy, based on data pre. ~ the solution of this problem has been discussed sented by N. C. B ~ d m a nSince in detail (Wang 1967a: 104-5), I will simply reproduce the rule here. @high -af alling alling The features [high] and [falling] in (9) are, of course, features of tone, not vowels. One cannot help but wonder if the rule using paired variables proposed for solving the Amoy tone circle is real, if no other instances can be found. I believe that I have now found another instance of a rule using paired variables. This rule deals with the central mechanism in the segmental morphophonernics of English, i.e. the great vowel shift. The remainder of this paper will be devoted to the discussion of that rule, i.e. rule (19) below. 2.1. The vowel system of English has undergone major changes in the past several centuries. Jespersen, who gave the phenomenon its vivid name,"escribed it as follows (1907:231) : The great vowel-shift consists in a general raising of all long vowels with the exception of the two high vowels [i] and [u], which could not be raised further without becoming consonants and which were diphthongized into [ei, ou], later [ai, au]. I n most cases the spelling has become fixed before the shift, which accordingly is one of the chief reasons of the divergence between spelling and sound in English: while the value of the short vowels ... remained on the whole intact, the value of the long vowels ... was changed.

Authorities differ in their understanding of the historical details of the shift. Thus, Jespersen groups the lowest vowel with the front vowels in his diagram of the shift (232), while Robertson and Cassidy group it with the back vowels in their diagram (99). Some scholars believe that the shift was initiated by the diphthongization of the high vowels, while others contend it was set in motion by the raising of the mid vowels. Opinions differ further on whether the diphthongization involves an intermediate stage when the nuclear vowel was centralized (see Stockwell 1966 for further discussion and references). It is relevant to our purpose here only to note that this shift has caused a large number of alternations in present-day English which any adequate grammar must account for. Some of these alternations are illustrated in Table 2.

* Cf. the description in Jakobson, Fant,

and Halle 1965:5-6. Stanley has used paired variables in the statement of a morpheme structure condition. According t o Robertson and Cassidy (1954:99).

699

VOWEL FEATURES AND T H E ENGLISH VOWEL S H I F T (A)

LONG VOWEL (SHIPTW)

(B)

SHOBT VOWEL (UNSHIPTW)

C EXAMPLES (LONG/SHORT)

hide/hid write/written keep/kept lead/led f able/f abulous grateful/gratitude prof ound/prof undity abound/abundance lose/lost

Many other observations about English phonology need to be discussed and rules posited to give a full account of the alternations exemplified in Table 2. For instance, the short vowels in lines 4 and 5 need to be further modified. Some of the alternations are more productive than others, e.g. the alternation in front vowels in lines 1-3 is much better attested than that in the back vowels. Some short vo~velsdo get shifted also, e.g. swim/swam. Furthermore, there are many exceptions: vowels which should shift but do not (i.e., which escape major rules), and vowels which should not shift but do (i.e., which require minor rule^).^ All in all, the picture is every bit as complex as a view of phonological change based on lexical diffusion would lead us to e x p e ~ t . ~ Without going into these complexities here, we will merely note that, in each case in Table 2, the shifted long vowel is in the morphologically simpler form while the unshifted short vowel is in the derived form. The explanation is that certain (but not all) derivational processes have the effect of shortening the vowel in the stem, thereby protecting it from the rule which effects the vowel shift. Note also that the long vo~velsare followed by glides that (except for /aj/) agree in tongue region with the vowel nucleus. 2.2. I n Chomsky and Halle's Sound pattern of English (1968), an attempt is made to formalize the alternations in Table 2 in terms of phonological rules. The rule which effects the vowel shift, reproduced as (10) below, is used in conjunction with a diphthongization rule which introduces glides, followed by a rule which converts /sj/ and /6w/ into /nj/ and /tiw/, respectively. I will be concerned with the vowel-shift rule only. The terms 'major' and 'minor' are adapted from Lakoff 1965, where his concern is with the study of exceptional forms in syntax. A detailed discussion of lexical diffusion may be found in Wang 196713. Typically, exceptions result from the gradualness with which sound changes diffuse across the lexicon. The fact that lexical diffusion takes time accounts for the large number of exceptions t h a t are found in any synchronic stage of a living language-and, incidentally, allows speech communities to adjust t o the changes. A change starts as a minor rule, which may be optional for those morphemes with dual pronunciations, making exceptions of the portion of the lexicon it covers; as it diffuses across the bulk of the lexicon it becomes a major rule, making exceptions of the portion of the lexicon it has not yet reached.

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 44, NUMBER 4 (1968)

According to rule (lo), the shift takes effect in two stages, (a) and (b), as shown in Table 3. Stage (a) exchanges high vowels [+high, -low] with mid vowels [-high, -lo~v],leaving low vo~velsunchanged. Stage (b) then exchanges mid vowels with low vowels, leaving high vowels unchanged. The two stages are conjunctively ordered. Each stage in (10) abbreviates three rules with respect to the contexts enclosed in the rightmost pair of braces. Expanding the variables, i t can be seen that (10) abbreviates a total of 24 rules.

Rule (10) may be challenged in two respects. First, it seems to me to be based on a set of features that is inadequate for a universal phonological theory. Second, there are serious defects in breaking the rule into two stages. I propose to describe the English vowel shift with a different set of vowel features. Further, I think that the rule should have a straightforward one-stage structure, using a pair of variables. With these modifications, it will be seen that the vowel-shift rule has the same shape as the rule describing the Amoy tone circle, (9). Thus, rules of that shape would seem to be the proper formal mechanism for describing this particular type of multiple (as opposed to binary), rotational type of alternation, whether the elements involved are tones or vowels. 2.3. The features on which rule (10) is based can distinguish a t most two tongue regions and three tongue heights, a t most a two by three matrix as shown in Table 4a. There are languages, however, which distinguish three tongue regions, as well as languages which distinguish four vowel heights.O Since the features in Table 4a are defined as binary, they cannot be extended to accommodate these contrasts; hence they are inadequate for a general theory of phonological description. 9 For a language with four distinctive vowel heights, cf. Ege 1965. On pp. 28 f., we find several minimal sets. Another set that Ege gave me is the following, where the words are all verbs: /ila, mela, mgla, mEla/, meaning 'to hurry, t o flour, to utter, to grind'. I n the various forms of Norwegian and Swedish, we can find three distinctive tongue regions in the high rounded vowels, e.g. /lys, ltts, lus/, meaning 'light, louse, pilot'. William Moulton has evidence that some German dialects have five distinctive vowel heights; in such rare cases another feature would have to be added, in much the same fashion as a third feature of tone height was needed for the rare five-level tone systems (cf. Wang 1967a).

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70 1

Table 4b shows the features proposed for tongue region and tongue height, together with some of the symbols for the commoner vowel qualities suggested by the IPA (1947:7-9).1° For tongue region I use the traditional features of place of articulation which are shared by consonants. For similar reasons, I use the feature 'labial' to distinguish between rounded and unrounded vowels, as well as between labial and non-labial consonants.ll This sharing of features by consonants and vowels is intended to show their articulatory commonality and to facilitate the description of their mutual influence in terms of phonological rules. A redundancy convention is required to indicate that the combination [+palatal, +velar] is impossible for vowels, on obvious physiological grounds; this is formulated in (11). (12) contains marking conventions to formalize the observations that central vowels [-palatal, -velar] are not favored in languages, and that high back vowels are usually labialized, whereas high front vowels (in the sense of high as shown in Table 4b) are usually not.12 (11) REDUNDANCY CONVENTIONS (a) [+palatal] t [-velar] (b) [+velar] -+ [-palatal] ..

,

[uPa1atal] uvelar

+

FOR VOWELS :

[olpalatal] avelar alabial -apalatal

10 The features of Table 4b of course do not exhaust the set of vowel features. Others include labialization, length, nasalization, voicing, and frication of various types. Fricated vowels are common in the Wu dialects of Chinese. 11 This is based on the assumption that there are no contrasts between plain labial consonants and labialized labial consonants a t the morphophonemic level of representation. l2 This particular correlation in vowels, i.e. [avelar, alabial], as well a3 the phonetic aspects of the vowel features, is discussed in detail in Wang 1968.

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Marking conventions may be understood in either an active or a passive view. The active view requires the specifications of u and m to be included as an actual part of lexical entries; these specifications are then REPLACED by plus and minus through the application of marking conventions (cf. Chomsky and Halle, 402-3). I n this active view, (12a) is not a well-formed marking convention, since its output is not unique: cases of such symmetry are in general not formulable in this view. Another difIiculty with the active view has to do with the fact that different parts of the embedding matrix may determine conflicting specifications for the same cell, through different marking conventions. I n the passive view of marking conventions which I adopt here, u and m are not used as specifications in lexical entries. The marking conventions simply serve the function of a 'price book' which associates lexicons with a measure of phoneticity. Neither of the two difIiculties mentioned here will then arise. For tongue height, two vowel features are proposed that are not shared by consonants. This also is in accord with the phonetics of the situation: while the place of articulation of consonants corresponds to the tongue region of vowels, tongue height cannot correspond to anything in consonant production, since consonants are by definition impossible when the aperture in the vocal tract exceeds a certain cross-sectional area. The relation between the two features is asymmetric in that [high] dominates [mid], which I believe is an advantage. I n a two-height system, only [high] is specified. The relation between the features [high] and [low] in Table 4a, on the other hand, is symmetric. In a two-height system, which feature we choose to specify is arbitrary. I n a three-height system, there is a [+mid] vowel which is distinct from the [-mid] vowels. Phonetically, such a vowel is typically intermediate in quality between the two other heights. This is predicted by the principle that the sounds of a language tend to maximize the perceptual distance from each other, which can be observed in many parts of the phonetic system in all languages (cf. Wang 1968:34-5). The more categories there are along a phonetic dimension, the more compressed we would expect the range of each category to be; yet the target values of pairs of adjacent categories should remain perceptually equidistant This situation with vowels is not unlike that of the non-contour tones.l3 These observations obviously should be built into a universal-phonetic interpretive system. Morphophonemically, however, and perhaps also phonemically, the mid vowels may be specified either [+high] or [-high], depending on their function in the phonological system; or they may be left unspecified. I n English the mid vowels function like the high vowels in that /e/ palatalizes and sibilates certain preceding consonants much as /i/ does; cf. induCe/induCtim, obliGe/obliGatim. (The so-called 'silent e' can be justified on morphophonemic grounds.) Therefore the mid vowels in English should be represented as [+high], which is accomplished by redundancy rule (13). This rule is to be applied in phonological derivations whenever it is applicable. RULE FOR ENGLISHMID VOWELS: (13) REDUNDANCY [ mid1 --+ [+high]

+

la See

the discussion in Wang 1967a on this point, especially p. 101, Fig. 2.

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Returning to rule (lo), we see that it can be reformulated with the features of Table 4b as (14) :

yvelar

(a) [-amid]

/

1

amid +high

]

@mid

2.4. Now we are ready to question another aspect of this approach to the English vowel shift, i.e. the decision to state the shift in two stages. There are two issues which bear upon this question. One has to do with the use of rule (10a) or (14a) as part of the derivation that converts /u/ to /A/. The second issue concerns the historical realism of such rules on the one hand and their phonetic naturalness on the other. Chomsky and Halle correctly observe that there are several alternations which involve the elements /u jiiw iiw Ciw A/, as in punish/punitive, profound/profundity. From a set of rather intricately constructed arguments, they propose to derive /A/ from an underlying short /u/. In their view, /A/ is different from /u/ in two feature specitications: /A/ is [+mid, -labial]; /u/ is [-mid, +labial]. Rule (14a) is used to provide the desired change for the feature [mid] in their analysis; the feature [labial] is changed by another rule. As can be seen from Table 3, the third part of (14a) changes /u/ into /o/. There are certain minor acuities in considering /A/, the vowel in flood, putt etc., to be the unrounded counterpart of /o/. For many speakers of standard American English, the vowels in good, look seem to be consistently different both from those in push, took and from those in putt, flood. In IPA symbols (8),one might represent these vowels as [a], [u], and [A],respectively. While it looks as though [a] is a way-station in the historical change from [u] to [A], a detailed study may very well require us to recognize all three qualities at the phonemic level for some dialects of English. There is an objection to (14), however, which is of greater theoretical interest. To see this clearly we need to examine the part of (14b) which is designed for /u/, in conjunction with the corresponding part of the outside environment. When we expand this portion of rule (14b) in several steps, we obtain (15), (16), and (17), where (17) is one of the four elementary rules contained in (16). -long ylabial

-mid

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The striking feature of (17) is that it is self-contradictory. In fact, the contradiction is with respect to two features, [mid] and [velar]. Essentially, it has the following form:

We see that it is not only the /o/ that (14a) produces which cannot undergo the (17) portion of (14b); rather, it is that NOTHING CAN. NOwell-formed segment will have opposite specifications for the same feature, and therefore no segment will fit the structural description of rules like (16). Rules like (17), in other words, are vacuous. The same procedure can be followed to demonstrate that rule (lob) contains self-contradictory elementary rules, since (14) is just a restatement of (10) with more adequate features. That rules (10) and (14) imply elementary rules which are self-contradictory and vacuous is a strong indication that they are basically incorrect. Clearly, one of the most self-evident formal universals in phonological theory must be that no phonology contains such elementary rules. This universal gives us a powerful guideline for distinguishing possible phonologies from arbitrary, fanciful rule systems. Such a well-formedness condition on phonologies would require us to reject a rule like (14) from English phonology. Quite apart from the considerations advanced above, we should note that the alternations of short /u/ are a different phonological process from the great vowel shift and probably should be described by a different set of rules altogether. Forcing the vowel-shift rule to participate in these alternations reduces the clarity with which the various processes in the sound system are formalized. 2.5. The other respect in which (14) may be discussed has to do in part with a notion that we may call the principle of historical realism.14 This principle requires us to choose that set of phonological rules which most faithfully recapitulates the historical events which actually occurred. In a weaker form, this principle is qualified by the proviso that it is to be applied only when it does not conflict with synchronic considerations; that is, synchronic factors outweigh diachronic ones, and the latter are used only when there is no synchronic basis for choice among alternative analyses. Or, in slightly different terms, the princi"My purpose here is t o evaluate all the possible arguments for or against rule (14). I do not suggest that Halle is an advocate of historical realism in synchronic descriptions. On the contrary, discussions with him have helped me see the defect of this principle more clearly.

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ple may require us to prefer those analyses which provide a better basis for describing dialect differences. I n the case of the vowel shift one could argue, on synchronic grounds, that (14) is more complicated in Halle's sense than the one-part rule (19) proposed below, in that the latter mentions fewer features. But this method of measuring phonological simplicity has many basic problems.1s We will not dwell on this issue, but suEce it to note here that there are some areas of incompatibility between Halle's simplicity measure (1962b :55) and Postal's naturalness condition (56) which must be solved before either notion can be fully effective. One possible approach to a solution is to regard the simplicity measure as applying only to synchronic analysis and the naturalness condition as applying only to diachronic analysis. What is much more important, it seems to me, is that the principle of historical realism is incorrect, in any of its forms. Let us grant for the moment that the history of English vowels did indeed develop in the sequence (14a-b). This seems to be Jespersen's opinion as seen from the paragraph quoted above. Now the question is: does this historical fact have any direct bearing on the synchronic analysis of English? The answer, I think, must be no. Undeniably, there is an intricate and interesting relation between the synchronic study of how sounds alternate and configurate, and the diachronic study of how sounds change and how they correspond across dialects. Indeed, the study of this relation lies at the very heart of phonological research. Knowing the history of a sound system can help us understand much better its synchronic behavior. At the same time, the comparison of synchronic systems gives us the most reliable clues for the reconstruction of earlier systems, as is well known. There is every reason to believe that diachronic and synchronic studies in phonology have an intimate symbiotic relation with each other. But this is not at all thesame as saying that a synchronic description should recapitulate the history of the system. To take this principle in its strictest terms is to deny the existence of synchronic phonology altogether. When there are two or more competing solutions among which we do not know how to choose, the difficulty could be due to any number of reasons. It could be because our phonological theory is still too gross to allow us to make certain finer judgments; this, in fact, is what I take to be the important lesson of Chao's famous article on non-uniqueness (1934).16 (Some of the problems of non-uniqueness, such as multiple complementation, stated for the first time with forceful clarity in that study, have now been eliminated with the advancement of the l6 Briefly, some of these problems are: (1) all features carry the same weight, which they should not; (2) some 'simple' feature combinations do not specify natural classes; (3) equally 'simple' rules may differ greatly in their naturalness; (4) 'simpler' rules may be phonetically less plausible than their more complex counterparts, etc. Many of these problems are being attacked by the development of marking conventions, linking rules, and hierarchical relations among features. l6 Many writers have incorrectly taken Chao's study t o be proof t h a t we have already reached the unanalysable core of indeterminacy t h a t is intrinsic t o phonological systems. The unfortunate consequence is that efforts t o refine theory are delayed. A constructive response t o the problems raised came only after some twenty years with the first printing i n 1952 of the Preliminaries by Jakobson et al.

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theory of phonological features; but many others, as well as new problems, remain to be solved.) Or it could be because we have not yet uncovered all the relevant synchronic facts which bear upon the problem. Perhaps it will t u n out that some hitherto unnoticed fact requires us to prefer one solution over another, or to propose a completely new one. But to base a synchronic choice purely on diachronic considerations is to have no synchronic basis of choice a t all. Worse still, it confuses the two areas of study and therefore makes independent discoveries in each more difficult. We cannot effectively study the relation between the two areas if we do not keep distinct the boundary that separates them. The synchronic description of a language is part of an explanatory theory of man's faculty of language. As such, the theory must not make use of information about his language that cannot be directly or indirectly attributable to him in a general and systematic way. Earlier stages of the language are no more cogent here than the fact that the coccyx was once part of proto-man's tail is relevant to a synchronic description of man's stance and walk. It is by no means easy, of course, to establish what types of technical linguistic information can be attributed to the speaker. Some of the statements a linguist makes in a phonological description may be justifiable on the basis of the synchronic pattern, but may not have any productive use for the speaker. There is a whole class of fascinating questions to be asked concerning how we can determine the psychological reality of the various components of a phonological description. When we say, somewhat metaphorically, that a speaker 'knows' the phonology of his language, we are in fact using the verb 'know' to cover many types of awareness. A phonology of English, for example, will include (a) rules governing the alternation among /s z az/ in plural formation; (b) rules governing the extrinsic variation between alveolar liquids and velar liquids, as well as the intrinsic variation between voiced and unvoiced liquids;" (c) the morpheme structure condition that, of a sequence of word-initial obstruents, the first must be /s/; and (d) the morpheme structure condition that /aw/ is not directly followed by labial or velar segments. I t would be relatively easy to design experiments to show that a speaker has different degrees of awareness of these four components of the phonology of his language; perhaps he will know (a) best and (d) least well, if at all. Is the degree of his awareness dependent on the formal character of the rule,I8 the complexity of the rule, the number of items in his lexicon for which the rule is relevant, a combination of these factors, or something else still? Though such questions have scarcely been raised, they obviously have a basic importance for phonological theory. Answers to them \rill help us arrive at a more explicit understanding of what a speaker knows and does not know about the phonologil7 Statements regarding intrinsic variation are made in the general theory and are only indirectly associated with specific phonologies. The terms intrinsic vs. extrinsic were proposed in Wang and Fillmore 1961, t o refer to universal vs. language-specific variations respectively. l8 I n Zimmer's study of Turkish (1969) it is noted that subjects are more aware of morphophonemic rules which govern the shape of suffixes AND stems than they are of morpheme structure conditions which govern the shape of stems only, even though both sets of rules s t a t e selectional restrictions in vowels of a comparable nature.

VOWEL FEATURES AND T H E ENGLISH VOWEL SHIFT

707

cal structure of his language, and to establish certain constraints on how abstract (i.e. non-phonetic) phonological representations may be.19

3. From the considerations discussed above we are led to a reformulation of (14) as follows. VOWEL-SHIFT RULE : (19) PROPOSED [%]Il;:

-+

[-amid phi.']

/

[;g]

Rule (19), it will be noted, has essentially the same canonical form as the tonecircle rule reproduced as (9) earlier. I t would seem that rules with paired variables are typically required to describe certain types of alternations which involve three or four elements. Note, however, that there are four possible vowels which are specified by the structural description of (19). The vowel /se/ will be changed to / E / , which is a step lower than the /e/ that is required. I t is at this point that the redundancy rule (13) comes in to raise /e/ to the desired height. Parenthetically, we may ask what would be the effect if we adopted the form of rule (19) but retained the features of tongue height of Table 4a. The feature [mid], then, would be replaced by the feature [lorn] in rule (19). I t can be easily seen that this leads to unacceptable results. An input /i/ would produce the output [+high, +low], an impossible element that cannot be resolved by any independently motivated rule. The vowel shift as formulated in (19) is diagrammed in Table 5 . I t is of interest to compare Table 5 with Table 3, where the shift is described in two stages, (a) and (b). Let us suppose for the present discussion that the picture suggested by Table 3 is historically correct. If we call the time before the shift tl, then there is a time tz a t which the synchronic phonology of English has added a rule, namely (14a), and there is a time ta at which English phonology adds yet another rule, namely (14b). Now Halle (1962:65) has made the important observation that one of the effects of phonological change, especially as a result of language trans1 9 The speaker must have some general idea of the network of contrasts in his language as it is reflected a t the phonemic level of phonological representations. I n addition he must also have an implicit awareness of morphophonemic alternations-both the kind in which a morpheme changes its own shape and the kind in which it causes an alternation in its neighbors. The morphemes which participate in alternations require morphophonemic representations, which are sometimes very abstract, as well as an associated set of morphophonemic rules. The morphemes which neither undergo nor cause alternations simply have phonemic representations and are exempt from the morphophonemic rules. Thus there are exactly two levels of phonological representation which are more abstract than the phonetic: the phonemic and the morphophonemic.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 44, NUMBER 4 (1968)

mission across generations, is t h a t of grammar simplification. Supposing Table 3 t o be historically true, rule (19) may be thought of as the result of simplifying the conjunction of (14a) and (14b). If this can be verified by external evidence, t h e relation between rules (14) and (19) constitutes a particularly subtle instance of how a sequence of diachronic rules telescopes into a single synchronic rulewhen the intermediate stage becomes irrelevant; i.e., the diachronic rules A > B > C are reflected in a synchronic rule of the form A-+C. REFERENCES CHAFE,WALLACE L. 1968. The ordering of phonological rules. IJAL 34.115-36. CHAO,Y. R. 1934. The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 4.363-97. CHOMSKY, NOAM,and MORRISHALLE.1968. The sound pattern of English. Harper & Row. EGE,NIELS.1965. The Danish vowel system. Gengo Kenkyu 47.21-35. Tokyo. HALLE, MORRIS.1962a. A descriptive convention for treating assimilation and dissimilation. MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, Quarterly Progress Report 66.295-6. -. 1962b. Phonology in generative grammar. Word 18.54-72. IPA. 1949. The principles of the International Phonetic Association. London. ROMAN; PANT;and MORRISHALLE.1952. Preliminaries to speech JAKOBSON, GUNNAR analysis. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. (6th printing, 1965.) JESPERSEN, OTTO.1907. A modern English grammar on historical principles. Part I, Sounds and spellings. Heidelberg. JOHNSON, C. DOUGLAS. 1968. The formal structure of phonological descriptions. University of California doctoral dissertation, Berkeley. LAKOFF,GEORGE.1965. On the nature of syntactic irregularity. Harvard University Computation Laboratory, report no. NSP-16. POSTAL, PAULM. 1968. Aspects of phonological theory. Harper & Row. ROBERTSON, STUART,and PREDERIC G. CASSIDY.1954. The development of modern English. 2d ed. New York: Prentice-Hall. STANLEY, RICHARD.1968. The formal character of redundancy rules in phonology. Berkeley, Project on Linguistic Analysis Reports (2d series), 6. (A revised version of his Redundancy rules in phonology, Lg. 43.393-436, 1967.) STOCKWELL, ROBERT P. 1966. Problems in the interpretation of the great English vowel shift. MS. ~VANG, WILLIAM S-Y. 1967a. Phonological features of tone. IJAL 33.93-105. -. 1967b. Competing changes as a cause of residue. Berkeley, Project on Linguistic Analysis Reports (2d series), 2. (To appear in Lg. 45:l.) -. 1968. The basis of speech. Berkeley, Project on Linguistics Analysis Reports (2d series), 4. (To be published by Prentice-Hall.) -, and CHARLES J. FILLMORE. 1961.

Intrinsic cues and consonant perception. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 4.180-6.

ZIMMER, KARL.1969. On the psychological correlates of some Turkish morpheme structure conditions. (To appear in Lg. 459.) [Received 29 April 19681

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You have printed the following article: Vowel Features, Paired Variables, and the English Vowel Shift William S-Y. Wang Language, Vol. 44, No. 4. (Dec., 1968), pp. 695-708. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0097-8507%28196812%2944%3A4%3C695%3AVFPVAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U

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The Ordering of Phonological Rules Wallace L. Chafe International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 34, No. 2. (Apr., 1968), pp. 115-136. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-7071%28196804%2934%3A2%3C115%3ATOOPR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1 3

Phonological Features of Tone William S-Y. Wang International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 33, No. 2. (Apr., 1967), pp. 93-105. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-7071%28196704%2933%3A2%3C93%3APFOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U 9

Phonological Features of Tone William S-Y. Wang International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 33, No. 2. (Apr., 1967), pp. 93-105. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-7071%28196704%2933%3A2%3C93%3APFOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U 13

Phonological Features of Tone William S-Y. Wang International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 33, No. 2. (Apr., 1967), pp. 93-105. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-7071%28196704%2933%3A2%3C93%3APFOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U

NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.

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LINKED CITATIONS - Page 2 of 2 -

References The Ordering of Phonological Rules Wallace L. Chafe International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 34, No. 2. (Apr., 1968), pp. 115-136. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-7071%28196804%2934%3A2%3C115%3ATOOPR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1

Phonological Features of Tone William S-Y. Wang International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 33, No. 2. (Apr., 1967), pp. 93-105. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-7071%28196704%2933%3A2%3C93%3APFOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U

NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.