Syllabic Consonants and Phonotactics Syllabic Consonants

Copy Link

Syllabic consonants and

phonotactics

Syllabic consonants

 Consonants that stand as the peak of the syllable, and perform

the functions of vowels, are called syllabic consonants.

 For example, in words like sudden and saddle, the consonant
[d] is followed by either the consonant [n] or [l] without a vowel intervening.

 The [n] of sadden and the [l] of saddle constitute the centre of the second, unstressed, syllable and are considered to be syllabic peaks.

 They typically occur in an unstressed syllable immediately following the alveolar consonants, [t, s, z] as well as [d].

Examples of syllabic consonants

 Cattle [kæțɬ]

 Couple [kʌpɬ]

 Panel[pæņɬ] wrestle [resɬ]

knuckle [nʌkɬ]

petal [petɬ]

pedal [pedɬ]
 Parcel [pa:șɬ]

 It is not unusual to find two syllabic consonants together. Examples are:  national  literal
[næʃņɬ]
[litrɬ]
 visionary  veteran
[viʒņri]

[vetrņ]

Phonotactics

 Phonotactic constraints determine what sounds can be put together to

form the different parts of a syllable in a language.

 Examples:

 English onsets /kl/ is okay: “clean” “clamp”  /pl/ is okay: “play” “plaque”  */tl/ is not okay: *tlay *tlamp. We don’t often have words that begin

with /tl/, /dm/, /rk/, etc. in English.
 However, these combinations can occur in the middle or final positions.

So, what is phonotactics?

 Phonotactics is part of the phonology of a language.  Phonotactics restricts the possible sound sequences and syllable structures in a language.

 Phonotactic constraint refers to any speciﬁc restriction

 To understand phonotactics, one must first understand

syllable structure.

Permissible language structures

 Languages differ in permissible syllable structures. Below

are some simpliﬁed examples.

 Hawaiian: V, CV  Japanese: V, CV, CVC

 Korean: V, CV, CVC, VCC, CVCC

 English: V CV CCV CCCV VC CVC CCVC CCCVC VCC CVCC



CCVCC CCCVCC VCCC CVCCC CCVCCC CCCVCCC

English consonant clusters sequences

 English allows CC and CCC clusters in onsets and codas, but they are highly restricted.

 English Onset Clusters (simplified)  CC stop, fricative + liquid, glide [s] + voiceless stop, nasal

 CCC [s] + voiceless stop + liquid, glide

Resolving constraint violations

 In codas, nasals may precede voiceless plosives, but only if they share the same place of articulation. jump [ʤʌmp], stunt [stʌnt], stink [stIɳk]

 Prohibited sounds sequences may arise for various

reasons, including: borrowing from another language, e.g.

tsunami [sunami] or [tsunami], from Japanese [tsuinami]

 Putting afﬁxes, words together sequentially cost + s→*sts

next store→*stst

Resolving identical constraints

 Consider the constraint *sts from some dialects of English.  Dialect A: resolve via deletion ghosts /gəʋst/→[gəʋss]  Dialect B: resolve via insertion ghosts /gəʋst/→[gəʋstəz] or [gəʋstəsəz] Constraints have different scopes in different dialects. e.g. a constraint may apply within a

word only, across word boundaries, or both.

Recommended publications

CONSONANT CLUSTER PHONOTACTICS: a PERCEPTUAL APPROACH by MARIE-HÉLÈNE CÔTÉ B.Sc. Sciences Économiques, Université De Montr

CONSONANT CLUSTER PHONOTACTICS: A PERCEPTUAL APPROACH by MARIE-HÉLÈNE CÔTÉ B.Sc. Sciences économiques, Université de Montréal (1987) Diplôme Relations Internationales, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (1990) D.E.A. Démographie économique, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (1991) M.A. Linguistique, Université de Montréal (1995) Submitted to the department of Linguistics and Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY À ma mère et à mon bébé, at the qui nous ont quittés À Marielle et Émile, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY qui nous sont arrivés À Jean-Pierre, qui est toujours là September 2000 © 2000 Marie-Hélène Côté. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to M.I.T. the permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part. Signature of author_________________________________________________ Department of Linguistics and Philosophy August 25, 2000 Certified by_______________________________________________________ Professor Michael Kenstowicz Thesis supervisor Accepted by______________________________________________________ Alec Marantz Chairman, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy CONSONANT CLUSTER PHONOTACTICS: A PERCEPTUAL APPROACH NOTES ON THE PRESENT VERSION by The present version, finished in July 2001, differs slightly from the official one, deposited in September 2000. The acknowledgments were finally added. The MARIE-HÉLÈNE CÔTÉ formatting was changed and the presentation generally improved. Several typos were corrected, and the references were updated, when papers originally cited as manuscripts were subsequently published. A couple of references were also added, as Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy well as short conclusions to chapters 3, 4, and 5, which for the most part summarize on September 5, 2000, in partial fulfillment of the requirements the chapter in question.
On Syncope in Old English

In: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds) Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries. In honour of Jacek Fisiak on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1986, 359-66. On syncope in Old English Raymond Hickey University of Bonn Abstract. Syncope in Old English is seen to be a rule which is determined by syllable structure but furthermore to be governed by a set of restricting conditions which refer to the world-class status of the forms which may act as input to the syncope rule, and also to the inflectional or derivational nature of the suffix which are added also to the precise phonological structure of those forms which undergo syncope. A phonological rule in a language which does not operate globally is always of particular interest as the conditions which restrict its application can frequently be recognized and formulized, at the same time throwing light on the nature of conditions which can in principle apply in a language’s phonology. In Old English a syncope rule existed which clearly related to the syllable structure of the forms it did not operate on but which was also subject to a set of restricting conditions which lie outside the domain of the syllable. The examination of this syncope rule and the conditions pertaining to it is the subject of this contribution. It is first of all necessary to distinguish syncope from another phonological process with which it might be confused. This is epenthesis, which appears to have been quite widespread in late West Saxon, as can be seen in the following forms.
Phonotactics on the Web 487

PHONOTACTICS ON THE WEB 487 APPENDIX Table A1 International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Computer-Readable “Klattese” Transcription Equivalents IPAKlattese IPA Klattese Stops Syllabic Consonants p p n N t t m M k k l L b b d d Glides and Semivowels g l l ɹ r Affricates w w tʃ C j y d J Vowels Sibilant Fricatives i i s s I ʃ S ε E z z e e Z @ Nonsibilant Fricatives ɑ a ɑu f f W θ a Y T v v ^ ð ɔ c D o h h O o o Nasals υ U n n u u m m R ŋ G ə x | X Klattese Transcription Conventions Repeated phonemes. The only situation in which a phoneme is repeated is in a compound word. For exam- ple, the word homemade is transcribed in Klattese as /hommed/. All other words with two successive phonemes that are the same just have a single segment. For example, shrilly would be transcribed in Klattese as /SrIli/. X/R alternation. /X/ appears only in unstressed syllables, and /R/ appears only in stressed syllables. Schwas. There are four schwas: /x/, /|/, /X/, and unstressed /U/. The /U/ in an unstressed syllable is taken as a rounded schwa. Syllabic consonants. The transcriptions are fairly liberal in the use of syllabic consonants. Words ending in -ism are transcribed /IzM/ even though a tiny schwa typically appears in the transition from the /z/ to the /M/. How- ever, /N/ does not appear unless it immediately follows a coronal. In general, /xl/ becomes /L/ unless it occurs be- fore a stressed vowel.
Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-Offs

Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs Tiago Pimentel Brian Roark Ryan Cotterell University of Cambridge Google University of Cambridge [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract 3.50 We present methods for calculating a mea- 3.25 sure of phonotactic complexity—bits per phoneme—that permits a straightforward 3.00 cross-linguistic comparison. When given a 2.75 word, represented as a sequence of phone- mic segments such as symbols in the inter- 2.50 national phonetic alphabet, and a statistical 2.25 model trained on a sample of word types 5 6 7 8 from the language, we can approximately Cross Entropy (bits per phoneme) Average Length (# IPA tokens) measure bits per phoneme using the negative log-probability of that word under the model. Figure 1: Bits-per-phoneme vs average word length This simple measure allows us to compare using an LSTM language model. the entropy across languages, giving insight into how complex a language’s phonotactics are. Using a collection of 1016 basic concept communicative capacity (Pellegrino et al., 2011; words across 106 languages, we demonstrate Coupé et al., 2019). a very strong negative correlation of −0:74 Methods for making hypotheses about linguis- between bits per phoneme and the average tic complexity objectively measurable and testable length of words. have long been of interest, though existing mea- sures are typically relatively coarse—see, e.g., 1 Introduction Moran and Blasi(2014) and §2 below for reviews. Brieﬂy, counting-based measures such as inventory One prevailing view on system-wide phonological sizes (e.g., numbers of vowels, consonants, sylla- complexity is that as one aspect increases in com- bles) typically play a key role in assessing phono- plexity (e.g., size of phonemic inventory), another logical complexity.
Alternatives to the Syllabic Interpretation Of

ALTERNATIVES TO SYLLABLE-BASED ACCOUNTS OF CONSONANTAL PHONOTACTICS Donca Steriade, UCLA Abstract Phonotactic statements characterize contextual restrictions on the occurrence of segments or feature values. This study argues that consonantal phonotactics are best understood as syllable-independent, string-based conditions reflecting positional differences in the perceptibility of contrasts. The analyses proposed here have better empirical coverage compared to syllable-based analyses that link a consonant's feature realization to its syllabic position. Syllable-based analyses require identification of word-medial syllabic divisions; the account proposed here does not and this may be a significant advantage. Word-medial syllable- edges are, under specific conditions, not uniformly identified by speakers; but comparable variability does not exist for phonotactic knowledge. The paper suggests that syllable- independent conditions define segmental phonotactics, and that word-edge phonotactics, in turn, are among the guidelines used by speakers to infer word-internal syllable divisions. 1. Introduction. The issue addressed here is the link between consonantal phonotactics and syllable structure conditions. Consider a paradigm case of the role attributed to syllables in current accounts of consonant distributions, based on Kahn (1976). Kahn suggests a syllable- based explanation of the fact that tpt, dbd, tkt, dgd strings - two coronal stops surrounding a non-coronal - are impossible in English. Kahn explains this gap by combining three hypotheses, two of which are specific to English, and a third with potential as a universal: (i) English onsets cannot contain stop-stop sequences; (ii) alveolar stops cannot precede non-coronals in English codas; and (iii) each segment/feature must belong to some syllable.
1 Phonotactics As Phonology: Knowledge of a Complex Constraint in Dutch René Kager (Utrecht University) and Joe Pater (Universi

Phonotactics as phonology: Knowledge of a complex constraint in Dutch René Kager (Utrecht University) and Joe Pater (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Abstract : The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster, where the second member of the cluster is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighborhood density. The experiment also shows that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure: it has a weaker effect on judgments when the last consonant begins a new syllable. We provide an account in terms of Hayes and Wilson’s Maximum Entropy model of phonotactics, using constraints that go beyond the complexity permitted by their model of constraint induction. 1. Introduction Phonological analysis and theorizing typically takes phonotactics as part of the data to be accounted for in terms of a phonological grammar. Ohala (1986) challenges this assumption, raising the possibility that knowledge of the shape of a language’s words could be reduced to “knowledge of the lexicon plus the possession of very general cognitive abilities”. 1 As an example of the requisite general cognitive abilities, he points to Greenberg and Jenkins’ (1964) similarity metric, which measures the closeness of a nonce word to the existing lexicon as proportional to the number of real words obtained by substituting any set of the nonce word’s segments with other segments. Like many other models of word-likeness or probability, Greenberg and Jenkins’ model of phonotactic knowledge is quite different from those constructed in phonological theory.
Chapter on Phonology

13 The (American) English Sound System 13.1a IPA Chart Consonants: Place & Manner of Articulation bilabial labiodental interdental alveolar palatal velar / glottal Plosives: [+voiced] b d g [voiced] p t k Fricatives: [+voiced] v ð z ž [voiced] f θ s š h Affricates: [+voiced] ǰ [voiced] č *Nasals: [+voiced] m n ŋ *Liquids: l r *Glides: w y *Syllabic Nasals and Liquids. When nasals /m/, /n/ and liquids /l/, /r/ take on vowellike properties, they are said to become syllabic: e.g., /ļ/ and /ŗ/ (denoted by a small line diacritic underneath the grapheme). Note how token examples (teacher) /tičŗ/, (little) /lIt ļ/, (table) /tebļ/ (vision) /vIžņ/, despite their creating syllable structures [CVCC] ([CVCC] = consonantvowel consonantconsonant), nonetheless generate a bisyllabic [CVCV] structure whereby we can ‘clapout’ by hand two syllables—e.g., [ [/ ti /] [/ čŗ /] ] and 312 Chapter Thirteen [ [/ lI /] [/ tļ /] ], each showing a [CVCC v] with final consonant [C v] denoting a vocalic /ŗ/ and /ļ/ (respectively). For this reason, ‘fluid’ [Consonantal] (vowellike) nasals, liquids (as well as glides) fall at the bottom half of the IPA chart in opposition to [+Consonantal] stops. 13.1b IPA American Vowels Diphthongs front: back: high: i u ay I ә U oy au e ^ o ε * ] low: æ a 13.1c Examples of IPA: Consonants / b / ball, rob, rabbit / d / dig, sad, sudden / g / got, jogger / p / pan, tip, rapper / t / tip, fit, punter / k / can, keep / v / vase, love / z / zip, buzz, cars / ž / measure, pleasure / f / fun, leaf / s / sip, cent, books / š / shoe, ocean, pressure / ð / the, further / l / lip, table, dollar / č / chair, cello / θ / with, theory / r / red, fear / ǰ / joke, lodge / w / with, water / y / you, year / h / house / m / make, ham / n / near, fan / ŋ / sing, pink The American English Sound System 313 *Note: Many varieties of American English cannot distinguish between the ‘open‘O’ vowel /]/ e.g., as is sounded in caught /k]t/ vs.
Vowel Epenthesis, Acoustics and Phonology Patterns in Moroccan Arabic Azra Ali, Mohamed Lahrouchi, Michael Ingleby

Vowel Epenthesis, Acoustics and Phonology Patterns in Moroccan Arabic Azra Ali, Mohamed Lahrouchi, Michael Ingleby To cite this version: Azra Ali, Mohamed Lahrouchi, Michael Ingleby. Vowel Epenthesis, Acoustics and Phonology Patterns in Moroccan Arabic. Interspeech 2008, 2008, Brisbane, Australia. pp.1178-1181. halshs-00432598 HAL Id: halshs-00432598 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00432598 Submitted on 16 Nov 2009 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Vowel Epenthesis, Acoustics and Phonology Patterns in Moroccan Arabic Azra N. Ali 1, Mohamed Lahrouchi 2, Michael Ingleby 1 1 School of Computing and Engineering, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, England. 2 CNRS, Paris-8, Paris, France. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] The most interesting early findings were made by Abstract Baothman et al. [5,6], who confirmed empirically in a large In Moroccan Arabic it is widely accepted that short vowels corpus of spoken Saudi Arabic that it has no branching are mostly elided, resulting in consonant clusters and onsets. She also found evidence in recordings and consonant geminates. In this paper we present evidence from spectrograms that a phonologically active sukuun is present our exploratory timing study that challenges this widely between clusters.
The Role of Vowel Phonotactics in Native Speech Segmentation

Published in Journal of Phonetics 49, 67-76, 2015, 1 which should be used for any reference to this work The role of vowel phonotactics in native speech segmentation a,⁎ b b c Katrin Skoruppa , Andrew Nevins , Adam Gillard , Stuart Rosen a German Seminar, University of Basel, Switzerland b Department of Linguistics, UCL, UK c Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, UCL, UK ABSTRACT Numerous studies have shown that listeners can use phonological cues such as word stress and consonant clusters to find word boundaries in fluent speech. This paper investigates whether they can also use language-specific restrictions on vowel positioning for native speech segmentation. We show that English adults can exploit the fact that typical English words do not end in a lax vowel (e.g. [*diːtʊ]) in order to segment unknown words in a nonsense phrase-picture matching task, in contrast to the null results in prior studies using lexical tasks. However, they only used this cue in quiet listening conditions, and not in the presence of background noise. Thus, like consonant clusters, the lax vowel constraint is vulnerable in adverse listening conditions. Keywords: Speech segmentation ; Phonological cues ; Phonotactics ; Lax vowel constraint 1. Introduction Breaking down continuous speech into word units is challenging because there are no clear acoustic correlates for word boundaries (Klatt, 1980). Recent work has shown that listeners are sensitive to a variety of cues signalling word boundaries, including lexical viability (e.g. Norris, McQueen, Cutler, Butterfield, & Kearns, 2001), transitional probabilities (e.g. Saffran, Newport, & Aslin, 1996) and phonological cues, including stress (e.g.
Online Companion to a Historical Phonology of English

A Historical Phonology of English Donka Minkova © Donka Minkova, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/12 Janson by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3467 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3468 2 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3469 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7755 9 (epub) The right of Donka Minkova to be identiﬁ ed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents Acknowledgements x List of abbreviations and symbols xii A note on the Companion to A Historical Phonology of English xv 1 Periods in the history of English 1 1.1 Periods in the history of English 2 1.2 Old English (450–1066) 2 1.3 Middle English (1066–1476) 9 1.4 Early Modern English (1476–1776) 15 1.5 English after 1776 17 1.6 The evidence for early pronunciation 20 2 The sounds of English 24 2.1 The consonants of PDE 24 2.1.1 Voicing 26 2.1.2 Place of articulation 27 2.1.3 Manner of articulation 29 2.1.4 Short and long consonants 31 2.2 The vowels of PDE 32 2.2.1 Short and long vowels 35 2.2.2 Complexity: monophthongs and diphthongs 37 2.3 The syllable: some basics 39 2.3.1 Syllable structure 39 2.3.2 Syllabiﬁ cation 40 2.3.3 Syllable weight 43 2.4 Notes on vowel representation 45 2.5 Phonological change: some types and causes 46 3 Discovering the earliest links: Indo- European
Phonotactics of Consonant Clusters in the History of English*

PHONOTACTICS OF CONSONANT CLUSTERS * IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH KATARZYNA DZIUBALSKA-KOŁACZYK School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland INTRODUCTION Consonant clusters are rare in the languages of the world (Maddieson 1999). Most lan- guages (70%) do not have clusters, and those which do have them prefer simple syllable on- sets. The ground for this is the universal preference for the CV-structure which in terms of Beats-and-Binding Phonology (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 1995, 2002) is predictable in accordance with the major preference for the n → B binding. The latter means that a combination of a non- beat (= n) with a beat (= B), best realized by a consonant + vowel syntagma, is the most pre- ferred phonological structure. It provides a good phonetic contrast which is both easy to hear and pronounce. The preference for the n → B binding (and, in consequence, for the CV) is derived from higher order semiotic and functional principles of, respectively, figure-and- ground and perceptibility/pronunciability. There are languages, however, among them also some major world languages with respect to the number of speakers, which do allow for clus- ters of consonants. English has been among them throughout its whole history. In order to survive in a language, clusters need to satisfy certain universal conditions, ex- pressible in terms of phonotactic preferences which derive the preferred clusters for all posi- tions within a word. Their function is, on the one hand, to counteract the CV-only preference and, on the other, to counteract the creation of dysfunctional clusters. Phonotactic preferences also allow for the evaluation of a given language-specific phonotactics.
Introductory Phonology

9781405184120_1_pre.qxd 06/06/2008 09:47 AM Page iii Introductory Phonology Bruce Hayes A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication 9781405184120_4_C04.qxd 06/06/2008 09:50 AM Page 70 4 Features 4.1 Introduction to Features: Representations Feature theory is part of a general approach in cognitive science which hypo- thesizes formal representations of mental phenomena. A representation is an abstract formal object that characterizes the essential properties of a mental entity. To begin with an example, most readers of this book are familiar with the words and music of the song “Happy Birthday to You.” The question is: what is it that they know? Or, to put it very literally, what information is embodied in their neurons that distinguishes a knower of “Happy Birthday” from a hypothetical person who is identical in every other respect but does not know the song? Much of this knowledge must be abstract. People can recognize “Happy Birth- day” when it is sung in a novel key, or by an unfamiliar voice, or using a different tempo or form of musical expression. Somehow, they can ignore (or cope in some other way with) inessential traits and attend to the essential ones. The latter include the linguistic text, the (relative) pitch sequences of the notes, the relative note dura- tions, and the musical harmonies that (often tacitly) accompany the tune. Cognitive science posits that humans possess mental representations, that is, formal mental objects depicting the structure of things we know or do. A typical claim is that we are capable of singing “Happy Birthday” because we have (during childhood) internalized a mental representation, fairly abstract in character, that embodies the structure of this song.