DOCSLIB.ORG

1 Tonal Processes Defined As Tone Sandhi Jie Zhang the University Of

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
1 Tonal Processes Defined As Tone Sandhi Jie Zhang the University Of Tonal Processes Defined as Tone Sandhi Jie Zhang The University of Kansas Keywords: tone sandhi, typology, tone features, productivity, syntax-phonology interface 1. Introduction In this section, I provide the definition of tone sandhi (as a phonological process by which lexical tones exhibit contextually determined alternation) and a brief discussion of why tone sandhi is particularly worth investigating in Chinese dialects. The general thesis here is that, due to tone sandhi’s prevalence and complexity in Chinese dialects, it sheds light on fundamental issues in phonological theory such as the role of typology in synchronic theories, learnability, productivity, feature representation, the interface between phonology and other domains of linguistics such as phonetics and morphosyntax, and the processing of phonological alternation. It sets the stage for the rest of the discussion. 2. Typological patterns This section provides an overview of the typological patterns of tone sandhi in Chinese dialects. Drawing on works by Yip (1980/1990), Wright (1983), Yue-Hashimoto (1987), Chen (1991, 1992, 1996, 2000), Duanmu (1994), Bao (1999, 2004), Zhang (2007), and others, the section first categorizes the tone sandhi patterns as left-dominant and right-dominant, as determined by the edge of the sandhi domain that maintains the base tone, then discusses a typological asymmetry between left- and right-dominant sandhi patterns: left-dominant patterns, as attested in Northern Wu dialects, generally involves the spreading of the initial tone rightward, while right-dominant patterns, as attested in Min, Southern Wu, and Mandarin dialects, typically involve paradigmatic tone changes in nonfinal positions. Another prominent issue in the typology of tone sandhi is the prevalence of phonetically arbitrary patterns. Although there are typological tendencies for tone sandhi to be related to phonetic assimilation, dissimilation, and contour reduction, counterexamples abound. The commonly attested synchronic chain shift in tone sandhi systems is also a manifestation of phonetic arbitrariness. For instance, the tone sandhis in the “tone circle” pattern in Taiwanese Southern Min, as given in (1), have no phonotactic, and hence, phonetic motivation, as the base tone itself is not phonotactically illegal in the sandhi position. (1) Taiwanese Southern Min tone sandhi: 51 " 55 " 33 ! 24 in non-XP-final positions % ' 21 The typology of Chinese tone sandhi patterns raises a number of questions regarding what synchronic tone patterns mean for phonological theory. To what extent do they provide arguments for the formal representation of tone? Are all synchronic patterns equally productive and learnable for speakers? And if not, what are the factors that influence the productivity of sandhi patterns, and what does this entail for the nature of tone sandhi grammar? Sections 3 and 4 explore these issues in further detail. 1 3. Tone sandhi and tonal representation The patterns of tone sandhi have featured prominently in the debate on the nature of tonal representation. The representational issue typically revolves around the following questions: (a) What is the tone-bearing unit (TBU)? (b) What are the primitive features of tone? (c) Are contour tones represented by unitary features or sequences of level features? (d) If there are different layers of tonal features such as register (representing the overall pitch height) and contour (representing TBU-internal pitch change), what is the geometric relation among the features: independence, dominance, or sisterhood? This section summarizes some of the major debates regarding these questions, drawing on works such as Wang (1967), Woo (1969), Yip (1980/1990, 1989), Duanmu (1994), Chen (1996), Bao (1999), Tsay (1994), and others. But the section also notes that the discussion of the formal representation of tone has been stymied, for two reasons. First, the impressionistic tonal transcriptions that theorists use are easily open to reinterpretation according to any theoretical position. Second, due to tone’s diachronic malleability, the synchronic tone sandhi patterns are likely a combination of productive phonology and lexicalized patterns. This makes the practice of using specific synchronic sandhi patterns as arguments for tonal representation suspect. It is suggested that more fruitful approaches to tonal representation are likely found in phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. For instance, in a large body of work on the nature of timing and coarticulation of Mandarin tones in different syllable types and speaking rates, Xu and colleagues showed that contextual tonal variations are better accounted for by asymptotic approximations of tonal targets that include both static and dynamic targets rather than static targets alone. Therefore, the underlying units for contour tones consist of dynamic targets such as [rise] and [fall] with a linear movement specification, and the entire syllable, regardless of its segmental composition, is the TBU (Xu 1998, 2001, Xu and Wang 2005, Prom-on et al. 2009, etc.). Xu’s view on the unit nature of contour tones is supported by speech error data on Taiwan Mandarin tones in Wan and Jaeger (1998). 4. The productivity of tone sandhi patterns The productivity and learnability of various tone sandhi patterns have been investigated under the nonce-problem tests (“wug” tests) in a long series of work since the 1970’s. Hsieh (1970, 1975, 1976), Wang (1993), and Zhang et al. (2011), for example, have shown that the circular chain shift in Taiwanese Southern Min is not fully productive, indicating that the analysis for the sandhi pattern should not be in the form of underlying representation to surface representation derivation, but lexical or allomorph listing. Zhang and Meng (2016) and Yan and Zhang (2016) provide a comparison between Shanghai and Wuxi tone sandhi. Both dialects have a left-dominant spreading pattern, but Shanghai simply spreads the tone of the initial syllable, while Wuxi needs to substitute the initial tone with another tone before spreading, and the tone substitution is paradigmatic and involves a chain shift. Wug test results showed that the Shanghai pattern is generally productive; for Wuxi, the spreading aspect of the tone sandhi is likewise productive, but the substitution aspect of the sandhi is unproductive due to its chain shift nature. Another aspect tone sandhi productivity is whether the productivity of a sandhi pattern is positively correlated with the phonetic naturalness of the sandhi. Zhang and Lai (2010) tested the productivity difference between the less natural T3 sandhi and the more natural half-third sandhi in Mandarin and showed that, although both sandhis apply consistently in novel words, 2 the former involves incomplete application of the sandhi phonetically and is thus less productive. Zhang et al. (2011) showed that the duration properties of tones play a role in the productivity of the sandhi patterns in Taiwanese Southern Min. These results support the relevance of phonetics in synchronic phonological grammar. In general, the productivity studies of tone sandhi demonstrate that native speakers’ phonological knowledge of tone sandhi is not necessarily identical to the lexical patterns of tone sandhi. In other words, traditional tone sandhi descriptions need to be supplemented with experimental data to serve as the empirical basis for theoretical analysis. 5. The processing of tone sandhi patterns The nature of tone sandhi can also be investigated by observing the production and perception processing of tone sandhi words. Chien et al. (2016, 2017) used auditorily primed lexical decision tasks to investigate the representation of tone sandhi words that the listeners use in lexical access in Mandarin and Taiwanese Southern Min. The basic method is to ask the subjects to decide whether a disyllabic item is an existing word in the language when the word is preceded by different types of monosyllabic primes that share either the base tone or the sandhi tone of the first syllable of the test item. The reaction time to the lexical decision is used as the dependent measure for the priming effect. The results showed a striking contrast between Mandarin and Taiwanese tone sandhi: for Mandarin T3 sandhi, the base-tone primes (i.e., T3 primes) elicit significant priming compared to control primes, while for Taiwanese tone sandhi in the circular chain shift, the surface-tone primes elicit significant priming. Moreover, the priming effect is regulated by word frequency in Taiwanese, but not for Mandarin. These results indicate that T3 sandhi words in Mandarin are represented in their base tones, while the sandhi words in Taiwanese are represented in their sandhi tones. These are consistent with the wug test results that suggest that the chain shift patterns in Taiwanese are lexicalized, while the Mandarin T3 sandhi pattern can be productively derived. Another line of research uses the implicit priming paradigm to investigate the representation of tone sandhi words used during speech production (e.g., Chen et al. 2011, Chen and Chen, in press, Politzer-Ahles and Zhang, in press). In implicit priming, participants memorize small sets of words that are each paired with a cue. Participants are then asked to say the words as quickly and accurately as possible when they see the cues. Reaction times tend to be faster when the targets in a set are phonologically homogeneous in terms of some initial portion of the word. Politzer-Ahles and Zhang (in press) used
Load more

Recommended publications
  • T3 Sandhi Rules of Different Prosodic Hierarchies
    T3 Sandhi rules of different prosodic hierarchies Abstract This study conducts acoustic analysis on T3 sandhi of two characters across different boundaries of prosodic hierarchies. The experimental data partly support Chen (2000)’s view about sandhi domain that “T3 sandhi takes place obligatorily within MRU”, and “sandhi rule can not apply cross intonation phrase boundary”. Nonetheless, the results do not support his claim that “there are no intermediate sandhi hierarchies between MRU and intonation phrase”. On the contrary, it is found that, although T3 sandhi could occur across all kinds of hierarchical boundaries between MRU and intonation phrase, T3 sandhi rules within a foot (prosodic word), or between foots without pause, or between pauses without intonation (phonology phrase) are very different in terms of acoustic properties. Furthermore, based on the facts that (1) T3 sandhi could occur cross boundary of pauses and (2) phrase-final sandhi could be significantly lengthening, it is argued that T3 sandhi is due to dissimilation of low tones, rather than duration reduction within MRU domain. It is also demonstrated that tone sandhi and prosodic hierarchies may not be equivalently evaluated in Chinese phonology. Prosodic hierarchies are determined by pause and lengthening, not by tone sandhi. Key words: tone sandhi; prosodic hierarchies; boundary; Mandarin Chinese 1 Introduction So-called T3 sandhi in mandarin Chinese has been widely discussed in Chinese Phonology. Mandarin Chinese has four tones: T1 (level 55), T2 (rising 35), T3 (low-rise 214), T4 (falling 51).Generally, when a T3 is followed by another T3, it turns into T2. The rule could be simply stated as: 214->35/ ___214.
    [Show full text]
  • Long-Distance /R/-Dissimilation in American English
    Long-Distance /r/-Dissimilation in American English Nancy Hall August 14, 2009 1 Introduction In many varieties of American English, it is possible to drop one /r/ from cer- tain words that contain two /r/s, such as su(r)prise, pa(r)ticular, gove(r)nor, and co(r)ner. This type of /r/-deletion is done by speakers who are basically ‘rhotic’; that is, who generally do not drop /r/ in any other position. It is a type of dissimi- lation, because it avoids the presence of multiple rhotics within a word.1 This paper has two goals. The first is to expand the description of American /r/-dissimilation by bringing together previously published examples of the process with new examples from an elicitation study and from corpora. This data set reveals new generalizations about the phonological environments that favor dissimilation. The second goal is to contribute to the long-running debate over why and how dissimilation happens, and particularly long-distance dissimilation. There is dis- pute over whether long-distance dissimilation is part of the grammar at all, and whether its functional grounding is a matter of articulatory constraints, processing constraints, or perception. Data from American /r/-dissimilation are especially im- portant for this debate, because the process is active, it is not restricted to only a few morphemes, and it occurs in a living language whose phonetics can be studied. Ar- guments in the literature are more often based on ancient diachronic dissimilation processes, or on processes that apply synchronically only in limited morphological contexts (and hence are likely fossilized remnants of once wider patterns).
    [Show full text]
  • Prosody of Tone Sandhi in Vietnamese Reduplications
    Prosody of Tone Sandhi in Vietnamese Reduplications Authors Thu Nguyen Linguistics program E.M.S.A.H. University of Queensland St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia Email: [email protected] John Ingram Linguistics program E.M.S.A.H. University of Queensland St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia Email: [email protected] Abstract In this paper we take advantage of the segmental control afforded by full and partial Vietnamese reduplications on a constant carrier phrase to obtain acoustic evidence of assymetrical prominence relations (van der Hulst 2005), in support of a hypothesis that Vietnamese reduplications are phonetically right headed and that tone sandhi is a reduction phenomenon occurring on prosodically weak positions (Shih, 2005). Acoustic parameters of syllable duration (onset, nucleus and coda), F0 range, F0 contour, vowel intensity, spectral tilt and vowel formant structure are analyzed to determine: (1) which syllable of the two (base or reduplicant) is more prominent and (2) how the tone sandhi forms differ from their full reduplicated counterparts. Comparisons of full and partial reduplicant syllables in tone sandhi forms provide additional support for this analysis. Key words: tone sandhi, prosody, stress, reduplication, Vietnamese, acoustic analysis ____________________________ We would like to thank our subjects for offering their voices for the analysis, Dr. Nguyen Hong Nguyen for statistical advice and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. The Postdoctoral research fellowship granted to the first author by the University of Queensland is acknowledged. Prosody of tone sandhi in Vietnamese reduplications 2 1. Introduction Vietnamese is a contour tone language, which is strongly syllabic in its phonological organization and morphology.
    [Show full text]
  • A Corpus Study of the 3 Tone Sandhi in Standard Chinese
    A Corpus Study of the 3 rd Tone Sandhi in Standard Chinese Yiya Chen 1, Jiahong Yuan 2 1 Department of Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen 2 Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania [email protected], [email protected] (Zhang 1988, Shih 1997, M. Chen 2000, Chen 2003, Chen Abstract 2004). Speer et al. (1989) show that listeners are indeed In Standard Chinese, a Low tone (Tone3) is often realized sensitive to a constituent’s phrasal structure in judging the application of the 3 rd tone Sandhi to constituents which could with a rising F0 contour before another Low tone, known as the 3rd tone Sandhi. This study investigates the acoustic be ambiguous between an underlying Rising tone and a characteristics of the 3rd tone Sandhi in Standard Chinese Sandhi Rising tone. Their results suggest the possibility that the higher linguistic boundary it is between two Low tones, using a large telephone conversation speech corpus. Sandhi rd Rising was found to be different from the underlying Rising the less likely the 3 tone sandhi rule is applied. With regard tone (Tone2) in bi-syllabic words in two measures: the to the difference between the underlying Rising tone and the Sandhi Rising tone, Peng (2000) show that the F0 maximum magnitude of the F 0 rising and the time span of the F 0 rising. We also found different effects of word frequency on Sandhi of SR is lower than R. Furthermore, in fast speech, a Sandhi Rising and the underlying Rising tones. Finally, for tri- Rising tone may flatten and show no apparent F0 rise (Kuo, syllabic constituents with Low tone only, constituent Xu, and Yip, to appear).
    [Show full text]
  • Is Phonological Consonant Epenthesis Possible? a Series of Artificial Grammar Learning Experiments
    Is Phonological Consonant Epenthesis Possible? A Series of Artificial Grammar Learning Experiments Rebecca L. Morley Abstract Consonant epenthesis is typically assumed to be part of the basic repertoire of phonological gram- mars. This implies that there exists some set of linguistic data that entails epenthesis as the best analy- sis. However, a series of artificial grammar learning experiments found no evidence that learners ever selected an epenthesis analysis. Instead, phonetic and morphological biases were revealed, along with individual variation in how learners generalized and regularized their input. These results, in combi- nation with previous work, suggest that synchronic consonant epenthesis may only emerge very rarely, from a gradual accumulation of changes over time. It is argued that the theoretical status of epenthesis must be reconsidered in light of these results, and that investigation of the sufficient learning conditions, and the diachronic developments necessary to produce those conditions, are of central importance to synchronic theory generally. 1 Introduction Epenthesis is defined as insertion of a segment that has no correspondent in the relevant lexical, or un- derlying, form. There are various types of epenthesis that can be defined in terms of either the insertion environment, the features of the epenthesized segment, or both. The focus of this paper is on consonant epenthesis and, more specifically, default consonant epenthesis that results in markedness reduction (e.g. Prince and Smolensky (1993/2004)). Consonant
    [Show full text]
  • Zhushan Mandarin
    ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE IPA Zhushan Mandarin Yiya Chen Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) [email protected] Li Guo Shanghai International Studies University [email protected] Zhushan Mandarin (ㄩኡ䈍) is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese (ISO 639-3; code: cmn) spoken in the Zhushan county (ㄩኡ৯), which belongs to the city of Shiyan (ॱ๠ᐲ) in Hubei Province (⒆ेⴱ), the People’s Republic of China. As shown in Figure 1, the county borders the city of Chongqing (䟽ᒶᐲ) to the south and Shaanxi Province (䲅㾯ⴱ) to the north. It has an area of 3,586 km2 and a population of about 4.7 million residents (Hubei Province Annals Committee 2017). The general consensus is that it is a Mandarin dialect (LAC 2012). However, there have been debates on the proper classification of this dialect as belonging to the Jianghuai Mandarin group (⊏␞ᇈ䈍) (e.g. Coblin 2005,X.B.Liu2007)ortothe Southwestern Mandarin group (㾯ইᇈ䈍) (e.g. Ting 1996,X.C.Liu2005,L.Li2009). Figure 1 Map of Zhushan County and its surrounding areas. The debated status of Zhushan Mandarin is believed to result not only from the influ- ence of the dialects from surrounding regions but also from the “combined effects of inheritance and convergence” in its linguistic system (Coblin 2005: 111). Many speakers Journal of the International Phonetic Association, page 1 of 19 © International Phonetic Association This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), whichpermitsunrestrictedre-use,distribution,andreproductioninanymedium,providedtheoriginalworkisproperlycited.
    [Show full text]
  • Hearing R-Sandhi: the Role of Past Experience Jennifer Hay Katie Drager Andy Gibson
    HEARING R-SANDHI: THE ROLE OF PAST EXPERIENCE JENNIFER HAY KATIE DRAGER ANDY GIBSON University of Canterbury University of Hawai‘i University of Canterbury at Mānoa This article reports on patterns in the production and perception of New Zealand English r-san - dhi. We report on two phoneme-monitoring experiments that examine whether listeners from three regions are sensitive to the distribution of r- presence in linking and intrusive environments. The results provide evidence that sound perception is affected by a listener’s experience-driven expec - tations: greater prior experience with a sound in a given context increases the likelihood of per - ceiving the sound in that context, regardless of whether the sound is present in the stimulus. For listeners with extremely limited prior exposure to a variant, the variant is especially salient and we also observe an experiment-internal effect of experience. We argue that our results support models that incorporate both word-specific and abstract probabilistic representations.* Keywords : salience, listener expectations, r-sandhi, sociophonetics, phoneme monitoring, speech perception, rhoticity 1. Introduction . Speech perception involves the extraction of words and sounds from a continuous speech signal. This normally occurs with little difficulty for the lis - tener, despite a great deal of variability in the acoustic properties of sounds. Listeners’ perception is informed by a large amount of information, including phonological con - text (Mann & Repp 1981), prior exposure in lexically relevant contexts (Norris et al. 2003, Maye et al. 2008), the lexical status of the word (Magnuson et al. 2003), the speaker who produced the sound (Kraljic & Samuel 2005, 2007), social characteristics attributed to the speaker (Strand & Johnson 1996, Hay et al.
    [Show full text]
  • An Examination of Oral Articulation of Vowel Nasality in the Light of the Independent Effects of Nasalization on Vowel Quality
    DOI: 10.17469/O2104AISV000002 CHRISTOPHER CARIGNAN An examination of oral articulation of vowel nasality in the light of the independent effects of nasalization on vowel quality In this paper, a summary is given of an experimental technique to address a known issue in research on the independent effects of nasalization on vowel acoustics: given that the separate transfer functions associated with the oral and nasal cavities are merged in the acoustic signal, the task of teasing apart the respective effects of the two cavities seems to be an intractable problem. The results obtained from the method reveal that the independent effects of nasal- ization on the acoustic vowel space are: F1-raising for high vowels, F1-lowering for non-high vowels, and F2-lowering for non-front vowels. The results from previous articulatory research performed by the author on the production of vowel nasality in French, Hindi, and English are discussed in the light of these independent effects of nasalization on vowel quality. Keywords: vowel nasality, vowel quality, articulation, acoustics, sound change. 1. Introduction A traditional characterization of vowel nasality adopts a seemingly binary classification of vowel sounds based on the relative height of the velum: nasal vowels are produced with a low velum position (and, thus, air radiation from both the oral and nasal cavities), where- as oral vowels are produced with a high velum position (and, thus, air radiation from the oral cavity alone). While it is unquestionably true that nasal vowels are produced with a lowered velum, this traditional characterization carries an implicit assumption about the state of the oral cavity for the production of a nasal vowel, i.e., that the nasal vowel maintains the same articulatory characteristics as its non-nasal counterpart in all aspects except for the height of the velum.
    [Show full text]
  • Morphophonology of Magahi
    International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR) ISSN: 2319-7064 SJIF (2019): 7.583 Morphophonology of Magahi Saloni Priya Jawaharlal Nehru University, SLL & CS, New Delhi, India Salonipriya17[at]gmail.com Abstract: Every languages has different types of word formation processes and each and every segment of morphology has a sound. The following paper is concerned with the sound changes or phonemic changes that occur during the word formation process in Magahi. Magahi is an Indo- Aryan Language spoken in eastern parts of Bihar and also in some parts of Jharkhand and West Bengal. The term Morphophonology refers to the interaction of word formation with the sound systems of a language. The paper finds out the phonetic rules interacting with the morphology of lexicons of Magahi. The observations shows that he most frequent morphophonological process are Sandhi, assimilation, Metathesis and Epenthesis. Whereas, the process of Dissimilation, Lenition and Fortition are very Uncommon in nature. Keywords: Morphology, Phonology, Sound Changes, Word formation process, Magahi, Words, Vowels, Consonants 1. Introduction 3.1 The Sources of Magahi Glossary Morphophonology refers to the interaction between Magahi has three kind of vocabulary sources; morphological and phonological or its phonetic processes. i) In the first category, it has those lexemes which has The aim of this paper is to give a detailed account on the been processed or influenced by Sanskrit, Prakrit, sound changes that take place in morphemes, when they Apbhransh, ect. Like, combine to form new words in the language. धमम> ध륍म> धरम, स셍म> सꥍ셍> सााँ셍 ii) In the second category, it has those words which are 2.
    [Show full text]
  • THE NATURE of VARIATION in TONE SANDHI PATTERNS of SHANGHAI and WUXI WU by Hanbo Yan Submitted to the Graduate Degree Program In
    THE NATURE OF VARIATION IN TONE SANDHI PATTERNS OF SHANGHAI AND WUXI WU By © 2016 Hanbo Yan Submitted to the graduate degree program in Linguistics and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. Jie Zhang ________________________________ Dr. Allard Jongman ________________________________ Dr. Joan Sereno ________________________________ Dr. Annie Tremblay ________________________________ Dr. Yan Li Date Defended: 05/11/2016 ii The Dissertation Committee for Hanbo Yan certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THE NATURE OF VARIATION IN TONE SANDHI PATTERNS OF SHANGHAI AND WUXI WU ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. Jie Zhang Date approved: 05/26/2016 iii Abstract The primary goal of this dissertation is to understand the variation patterns in suprasegmental processes and what factors influence the patterns. To answer the questions, we investigated the variation patterns of tone sandhi in the Shanghai and Wuxi Wu dialects of Chinese. Shanghai disyllables and trisyllables have been documented to have two different sandhi patterns: tonal extension and tonal reduction. Some items can only undergo tonal extension, some items can only undergo tonal reduction, and some can variably undergo either type of sandhi. Previous works have indicated that the syntactic structure, semantic transparency, and lexical frequency of the items all play a role in the sandhi application. Additionally, the morpheme length of trisyllabic items (1+2, 2+1) is also expected to affect their sandhi application. A variant forms’ goodness rating experiment, together with a lexical frequency rating experiment and a semantic transparency rating experiment, showed that syntactic structure has a primary effect on sandhi application in general.
    [Show full text]
  • Word-Level Distributions and Structural Factors Codetermine GOOSE Fronting
    Word-level distributions and structural factors codetermine GOOSE fronting Márton Sóskuthy1, Paul Foulkes1, Bill Haddican2, Jen Hay3, Vincent Hughes1 1University of York, 2CUNY – Queens College, 3NZILBB – University of Canterbury {marton.soskuthy|paul.foulkes|vincent.hughes}@york.ac.uk, [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT examples of GOOSE in these classes derive historically from different monophthongs and We analyse dynamic formant data from a corpus of diphthongs, mainly Middle English /oː/, /iu/ and /ɛu/. Derby English spanning three generations, focusing GOOSE words containing /j/ are subject to variation on the relationship between yod-dropping and in most dialects of present-day English. The /j/ may GOOSE (/uː/)-fronting. Derby English exhibits a undergo a process of ‘coalescence’ with adjacent stable but variable pattern of yod-dropping in post- consonants (thus issue may be /ɪsjuː/ or /ɪʃuː/), or coronal position (e.g. new [njuː]~[nuː]), and an deletion. The latter process is often referred to as ongoing process of /uː/-fronting. The degree of /uː/- yod-dropping (i.e. new may be /njuː/ or /nuː/). fronting is highest in words which categorically Deletion varies markedly across dialects, include yod (e.g. cube) and lower in words which particularly in stressed positions [20]. Historical /j/ never show a yod (e.g. noodle). Words with variable was lost earliest after palatals, /r/ and /l/ (chew, rude, yod-dropping exhibit intermediate degrees of blue), and is now almost universally absent in these fronting. The degree of fronting in variable words is contexts [20]. Most contemporary British and North partly determined by how frequent the lexical item American dialects show variation according to is: frequent words undergo more fronting than preceding context.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Anatomy of a Chain Shift1 DANIEL A
    J. Linguistics, Page 1 of 25. f Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S0022226710000368 On the anatomy of a chain shift1 DANIEL A. DINNSEN, CHRISTOPHER R. GREEN, JUDITH A. GIERUT & MICHELE L. MORRISETTE Indiana University (Received 4 September 2009; revised 28 April 2010) Phonological chain shifts have been the focus of many theoretical, developmental, and clinical concerns. This paper considers an overlooked property of the problem by focusing on the typological properties of the widely attested ‘s>h>f’ chain shift involving the processes of Labialization and Dentalization in early phonological development. Findings are reported from a cross-sectional study of 234 children (ages 3 years; 0 months–7;9) with functional (nonorganic) phonological delays. The results reveal some unexpected gaps in the predicted interactions of these processes and are brought to bear on the evaluation of recent optimality theoretic proposals for the characterization of phonological interactions. A developmental modification to the theory is proposed that has the desired effect of precluding certain early-stage grammars. The proposal is further evaluated against the facts of another widely cited developmental chain shift known as the ‘puzzle>puddle>pickle’ problem (Smith 1973). 1. I NTRODUCTION A common phenomenon in both first- and second-language acquisition and in fully-developed languages is for phonological processes to participate in a chain shift (e.g. Moreton & Smolensky 2002, Jesney 2005, Dinnsen 2008b). Chain shifts typically involve two phonological processes that interact in such a way that they result in an opaque generalization (i.e. one that is not surface-true). This phenomenon has generated much discussion and contro- versy in the theoretical, developmental, and clinical literature over the years and has raised questions about the very nature of chain shifts.
    [Show full text]