DOCSLIB.ORG

QUANTIFYING the SONORITY HIERARCHY a Dissertation

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
QUANTIFYING the SONORITY HIERARCHY a Dissertation QUANTIFYING THE SONORITY HIERARCHY A Dissertation Presented by STEPHEN G. PARKER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2002 Linguistics © Copyright by Stephen G. Parker 2002 All Rights Reserved QUANTIFYING THE SONORITY HIERARCHY A Dissertation Presented by STEPHEN G. PARKER Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________________________ John Kingston, Chair _______________________________________________________ John McCarthy, Member _______________________________________________________ Elisabeth Selkirk, Member _______________________________________________________ Shelley Velleman, Member ____________________________________ Elisabeth Selkirk, Department Head Department of Linguistics DEDICATION To my beloved wife, Mónica. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is the section of the dissertation where you’re supposed to tell everyone you know how grateful you are for everything they’ve done for you. Flattery and exaggeration are typical devices, and even seem to be somewhat expected. Since most of these acknowledgement sections begin with the doctoral committee, I guess that’s where I have to start. My chair, John Kingston, spent countless hours with me in the phonetics lab. Without his constant technical support, my experiment never would have gotten off the ground. I had so many meetings with him that I can actually say I learned as much from him outside the classroom as inside (not that he’s a bad teacher). During the course of my six years here at UMass, I’ve come to appreciate him not only as a mentor and colleague, but also as a friend. John McCarthy has been a true role model and has taught me more about phonology than I could sometimes absorb. He patiently answered every question I could dream up, some of which were devious, dastardly, and duplicitous. He also holds the distinction of reading and commenting on virtually everything I’ve written while here at UMass, leading to much-needed improvements in my work. For this I will always be thankful. Lisa Selkirk has always challenged me to look at things in new ways that I had not previously considered. While this is not always easy to do, it is really the best way to discover new insights that will take your work to the next level of proficiency. In addition, her support as chair of the department was completely instrumental(!) in allowing us to acquire the equipment we needed to run my v experiment. I am also grateful to her for permitting me to be funded through the department for my sixth year. Shelley Velleman kindly agreed to be the outside member of my committee even though she barely knew me when I first approached her. All of my meetings with her were pleasant and productive. She has a good eye for detail and made many valuable suggestions about my writing style, punctuation, and grammar. My thanks also to the remaining members of the faculty, as well as to Kathy Adamczyk and Lynne Ballard, for making my time here very memorable. I am further indebted to the Interlibrary Loan team of the main library for helping me access tons of obscure references. I wouldn’t have made it this far without the encouragement of my classmates. I especially want to recognize Ania Lubowicz, Mariko Sugahara, Elisabeth Villalta, Mike Terry, and Pius Tamanji (the vulture of the soccer field). I’ve also been helped on many occasions by the other members of our informal phonology group, including John Alderete, Brett Baker, Angela Carpenter, Della Chambless, Ioana Chitoran, Andries Coetzee, Ben Gelbart, Maria Gouskova, Nancy Hall, Caroline Jones, Cecilia Kirk, Elliott Moreton, Joe Pater, Samira Rguibi, Jen Smith, Caro Struijke, Anne-Michelle Tessier, Rachel Walker, and Adam Werle. I’ve reserved a separate accolade for Paul de Lacy. He has selflessly read and commented on more of my papers than any other fellow graduate student here at UMass. He also answered my numerous questions and always impresses me with his theoretical cogency and insight (this is the flattery part). vi Next I come to numerous SIL colleagues and friends who have encouraged me through the years and provided much-needed spiritual counsel and support: Andy and Cheri Black, Beth Bryson, Don Burquest, Mike Cahill, Bob Carlson, Bob Dooley, Andy Eatough, George and Mary Huttar, Mark Karan, Steve and Cathy Marlett, Bob Mugele, David Payne, Jim Roberts, Stephen Walker, David Weber, Lindsay Whaley, and Mary Ruth Wise. John Clifton taught the first linguistics course I ever took, back in 1978 at Indiana University. I also wish to thank our supporting churches in Massachusetts, Indiana, and Peru, and especially the three one-on-one prayer partners who have shared with me the ups and downs of life here in Amherst: Don Lenze, Craig Nicolson, and Frank Massey. Craig in particular single-handedly taught me everything there is to know about using Microsoft Excel (exaggeration). Special thanks are due to Henry Tehrani and the rest of the Scicon R&D team for making available the PCquirer hardware and software, and for answering many questions about their use. Peter Ladefoged also gave us important technical advice. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant no. 0003947 to John Kingston and myself. I am indebted to several anonymous NSF reviewers, one of whom identified herself to me as Lisa Lavoie (she shared her dissertation with me as well). I also wish to acknowledge a grant from the SIL Fund for Scholarly Advancement, administered by Mickey Brussow. I could never have obtained all of these results without the many volunteer subjects who filled in vii my torturous list of 99 hypothetical words and grunted into our facial masks in the lab. I especially appreciate all of the amigos colombianos who participated in my experiment. To make a long story longer, I mustn’t forget Arnie Well for letting me audit his statistics courses, and Jeff Sickmeier for being my best friend and best man. Throughout my life I have been blessed to have a wonderful and supportive family: father, mother, siblings, in-laws, etc. I am grateful to each one of you for your part in my upbringing. And then there is Mónica — my wife, my encourager, my lover, my peor es nada, my soulmate. Thanks for your patience as I spent hundreds of hours in the lab, in the library, and at the computer. As the poet said, “Por primera vez vivíamos juntos en la misma casa. En aquel sitio de embriagadora belleza nuestro amor se acrecentó. Ya no pudimos nunca más separarnos.” Thanks for being by my side all these years. This dissertation is offered as a sacrifice to Him who is the way, and the truth, and the life: “Jesus then said to those Jewish people who had believed in him, ‘If you abide in my word, then you are really my disciples, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’” (John 8:31-32) viii ABSTRACT QUANTIFYING THE SONORITY HIERARCHY MAY 2002 STEPHEN PARKER, B.A., INDIANA UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor John Kingston A long-standing controversy in the interface between phonetics and phonology involves the nature of sonority. This dissertation seeks to help resolve this problem by showing that the sonority hierarchy is both physically and psychologically real. This is accomplished by reporting the results of two rigorous and in-depth experiments. The first of these involves phonetic (instrumental) measurements of five acoustic and aerodynamic correlates of sonority in English and Spanish: intensity, frequency of the first formant, total segmental duration, peak intraoral air pressure, and combined oral plus nasal air flow. Intensity values are found to consistently yield a correlation of at least .97 with typical sonority indices. Consequently, sonority is best defined in terms of a linear regression equation derived from the observed intensity results. The second major experiment — this one psycholinguistic in nature — involves a common process of playful reduplication in English. A list of 99 hypothetical rhyming pairs such as roshy-toshy was evaluated by 332 native speakers. Their task was to judge which order sounds more natural, e.g., roshy- ix toshy or toshy-roshy. The data again confirm the crucial importance of sonority in accounting for the observed results. Specifically, the unmarked (preferred) pattern is for the morpheme beginning with the more sonorous segment in each pair to occur in absolute word-initial position. A generalized version of the Syllable Contact Law is utilized in the formal analysis of this phenomenon in terms of Optimality Theory. Finally, a complete and universal sonority hierarchy is posited by building on the findings of the two experiments as a whole. x TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................. v ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... ix LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. xv LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................ xxiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.......................................................................................... xxv CHAPTER INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................
Load more

Recommended publications
  • What Matters in Artificial Learning, Sonority Hierarchy Or Natural Classes?
    What Matters in Artificial Learning, Sonority Hierarchy or Natural Classes? Yu-Leng Lin* University of Toronto 1 Introduction In recent years, questions have been raised in linguistics about just what properties of grammar are universal and what emerges through exposure to language (Blevins 2004, 2006, Moreton 2008, Botma 2011, Mielke 2011, Parker 2008, Parker 2011 among others). In this paper, I address a particular aspect of this issue, focusing on the susceptibility of segments of different types to nasalization. More particularly, the study examines the nasalized segment constraint hierarchy, *nasalized plosive >> *nasalized fricative >> *nasalized liquid >> *nasalized glide >> *nasalized laryngeal >> *nasalized vowel proposed by Walker (2000), concentrating on the relationship between targets and blockers of nasal harmony. Nasal harmony is cross-linguistically common (a local process where a nasal trigger spreads the feature [nasal] rightward or leftward, stops when it encounters a blocker, see Walker 2011), but still insufficiently understood. The nasalized segment constraint hierarchy is generally considered to be related to sonority, with a more sonorant segment more likely to be nasalized, and with a less sonorant segment being nasalized in nasal harmony only if more sonorant segments are. There is a debate about the status of the sonority scale, with some arguing that it is phonological (e.g., Hooper 1976, Clements 1990, Blevins 1995, Zec 2007), and others arguing that it is a consequence of phonetic correlates, and epiphenomenal (e.g., Gordon 1999, Henke et al. 2012, Evans & Levinson 2009, Daland et al. 2011). One reason for considering the sonority hierarchy to be phonological is that there are some differences between languages in how particular segments interact in terms of sonority but the sonority hierarchy of different languages all follow the same tendency (least sonorant to more sonorant).
    [Show full text]
  • It Is Not All Downhill from Here: Syllable Contact Law in Persian
    It is not all downhill from here: Syllable Contact Law in Persian Afshin Rahimi, Moharram Eslami, Bahram Vazirnezhad Abstract Syllable contact pairs cross-linguistically tend to have a falling sonority slope, a constraint which is called the Syllable Contact Law (SCL). In this study, the phonotactics of syllable contacts in 4202 CVC.CVC words of Persian lexicon is investigated. The consonants of Persian were divided into five sonority categories and the frequency of all possible sonority slopes is computed both in lexicon (type frequency) and in corpus (token frequency). Since an unmarked phonological structure has been shown to diachronically become more frequent we expect to see the same pattern for syllable contact pairs with falling sonority slope. The correlation of sonority categories of the two consonants in a syllable contact pair is measured using Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) both in lexicon level and in corpus level. Results show that SCL is not a categorical constraint in Persian and all possible sonority slopes are observed. In addition evidence show that at lexical level, the less sonority slope (-4 to +4), the more frequent. The reason of frequency increase is shown to be the tendency of non-sonorants such as stops and fricatives to occur in onset position, their reluctance to occur in coda position and the tendency of sonorants such as nasals and liquids to occur in coda position rather than onset position. PMI between sonority categories of two consonants in a syllable contact pair provides evidence against SCL in Persian. In other words, the sonority categories don’t impose any restriction on each other and are not correlated.
    [Show full text]
  • Modelling Sonority with Complementary Symbol and Signal Based Models
    The double life of language systems: Modelling sonority with complementary symbol and signal based models Aviad Albert1 & Bruno Nicenboim2,3 1 Department of Linguistics—Phonetics, University of Cologne 2 Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University 3 Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam Abstract Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and evidently useful as a predictor of phonotactics (i.e., the propensity of different consonants and vowels to com- bine via concatenation). Although widely-accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, and traditional sonority princi- ples exhibit gaps in empirical coverage, while they are also not designed to be compatible with general cognitive capacities. Against the backdrop of traditional sonority accounts, which have been exclusively based on dis- crete and symbolic machinery to model sonority, we propose an incorpo- ration of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority with two complementary models. We claim that sonority is primar- ily a perceptual phenomenon related to the strength and quality of pitch per- ception, postulating a universal drive to optimize syllables as pitch-bearing units. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syl- labic well-formedness based on principles of competition in real-time; the Nucleus Attraction Principle (NAP). We present two perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare the differ- ent sonority models.
    [Show full text]
  • Sonority As a Primitive: Evidence from Phonological Inventories
    Sonority as a Primitive: Evidence from Phonological Inventories Ivy Hauser University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1. Introduction The nature of sonority remains a controversial subject in both phonology and phonetics. Previous discussions on sonority have generally been situated in synchronic phonology through syllable structure constraints (Clements, 1990) or in phonetics through physical correlates to sonority (Parker, 2002). This paper seeks to examine the sonority hierarchy through a new dimension by exploring the relationship between sonority and phonological inventory structure. The investigation will shed light on the nature of sonority as a phonological phenomenon in addition to addressing the question of what processes underlie the formation and structure of speech sound inventories. This paper will examine a phenomenon present in phonological inventories that has yet to be discussed in previous literature and cannot be explained by current theories of inventory formation. I will then suggest implications of this phenomenon as evidence for sonority as a grammatical primitive. The data described here reveals that sonority has an effect in the formation of phonological inventories by determining how many segments an inventory will have in a given class of sounds (voiced fricatives, etc.). Segment classes which are closest to each other along the sonority hierarchy tend to be correlated in size except upon crossing the sonorant/obstruent and consonant/vowel boundaries. This paper argues that inventories are therefore composed of three distinct classes of obstruents, sonorants, and vowels which independently determine the size and structure of the inventory. The prominence of sonority in inventory formation provides evidence for the notion that sonority is a phonological primitive and is not simply derived from other aspects of the grammar or a more basic set of features.
    [Show full text]
  • The Role of Sonority Profile and Order of Place of Articulation on Gestural Overlap in Georgian Caroline Crouch, Argyro Katsika, Ioana Chitoran
    The role of sonority profile and order of place of articulation on gestural overlap in Georgian Caroline Crouch, Argyro Katsika, Ioana Chitoran To cite this version: Caroline Crouch, Argyro Katsika, Ioana Chitoran. The role of sonority profile and order of place of articulation on gestural overlap in Georgian. Speech Prosody 2020, May 2020, Tokyo, Japan. 10.21437/speechprosody.2020-42. hal-03127480 HAL Id: hal-03127480 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03127480 Submitted on 1 Feb 2021 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. 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020 25-28 May 2020, Tokyo, Japan The role of sonority profile and order of place of articulation on gestural overlap in Georgian Caroline Crouch1, Argyro Katsika1, Ioana Chitoran2 1University of California, Santa Barbara 2Université Paris Diderot [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] important role in ensuring the recoverability of some Abstract segments; for example, in stop-stop sequences decreased Sonority sequencing principles can account for phonotactic overlap allows for both stops to have a release burst, processes across languages, but the articulatory correlates of preserving crucial place cues for the first stop [5] [6].
    [Show full text]
  • Grounded Constraints and the Consonants of Setswana✩
    Grounded Constraints and The Consonants of Setswana✩ Maria Gouskovaa,∗,ElizabethZsigab,∗, One Tlale Boyerb aNew York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003,USA bGeorgetown University, Poulton Hall 240, 1437 37th Street NW, Washington, DC 20057, USA Abstract The article examines the phonology and phonetics of Setswanaobstruentsandthewellknown and controversial post-nasal devoicing rule, which has beencitedasacounterexampletotheclaim that markedness constraints are phonetically grounded (Hyman 2001). We re-examine the case of Setswana and argue that it must be analyzed in terms of grounded constraints. Our evidence comes from two sources. First, we report on the results of a phoneticstudyofsixspeakersoftheSengwato dialect of Setswana. We found that some of our speakers did nothavevoicedobstruentsinany context. Those speakers that did devoice post-nasally also devoiced in other contexts. Thus, a phonetic examination of the purported counterexample to phonetically grounded constraints fails to support the traditional descriptions. Second, we examinethelargerphonologicalcontextin which the Setswana alternations occur. Setswana has a gappedsystemoflaryngealcontrasts,so the evidence for post-nasal devoicing comes almost entirelyfromlabialstops.Thelanguagealsohas aseriesofso-calledstrengtheningalternationsthataffectconsonantssuchasliquidsandfricatives post-nasally—alternations that we propose to analyze in terms of the Syllable Contact Law. Keywords: Voicing, ejectives, post-nasal voicing, substantive grounding, prominence scales,
    [Show full text]
  • Sonority Sequencing Principle in Sabzevari Persian: a Constraint-Based Approach
    Open Linguistics 2019; 5: 434–465 Research Article Mufleh Salem M. Alqahtani* Sonority Sequencing Principle in Sabzevari Persian: A Constraint-Based Approach https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2019-0024 Received October 11, 2018; accepted October 15, 2019 Abstract: This study sheds light on the relationship between the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) and syllable structure in Sabzevari, a Persian vernacular spoken in the Sabzevar area of Northeast Iran. Optimality Theory (OT), as a constraint-based approach, is utilized to scrutinize sonority violation and its repair strategies. The results suggest that obedience to the SSP is mandatory in Sabzevari, as shown through the treatment of word-final clusters in Standard Persian words which violate the SSP. These consonant clusters are avoided in Sabzevari by two phonological processes: vowel epenthesis and metathesis. Vowel epenthesis is motivated by final consonant clusters of the forms /fricative+coronal nasal/, /plosive+bilabial nasal/, /fricative+bilabial nasal/, /plosive+rhotic/, /fricative+rhotic/, and /plosive+lateral/. Metathesis, as another repair strategy for sonority sequencing violations, occurs when dealing with final consonant clusters of the forms /plosive+fricative/ and / fricative+lateral/. Keywords: Sabzevari syllable structure; SSP violation; vowel epenthesis; metathesis; Optimality Theory (OT) 1 Introduction Studies conducted on sonority demonstrate a significant role in the organization of syllables in natural languages (Clements 1990; Laks 1990; Klein 1990). Consonants and vowels in most languages are combined to form syllables while other sonorant consonants can represent nuclei in languages including English (Treiman et al., 1993; Ridouane 2008), German (Roach 2002; Ridouane 2008), Czech (Roach 2002; Ridouane 2008), and Barber (Ridouane 2008).1 Their arrangement is such that sonority is highest at the peak and drops from the peak towards the margins (Clements 1990).
    [Show full text]
  • Nasal Consonants, Sonority and Syllable Phonotactics: the Dual Nasal Hypothesis* Martin Krämer Uit the Arctic University of Norway Draga Zec Cornell University
    Phonology 37 (2020) 27–63. © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S0952675720000032 Nasal consonants, sonority and syllable phonotactics: the dual nasal hypothesis* Martin Krämer UiT The Arctic University of Norway Draga Zec Cornell University We investigate the phonotactic behaviour of nasal consonants in a database of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge the common classification of nasals as inter- mediate between obstruents and liquids on the sonority hierarchy. Instead, we propose that there are two types of nasal consonants, one group with lower sonor- ity than liquids and one with higher sonority. We propose that these two types of nasals differ in the presence or absence of a value for the feature [±continuant]. 1 Introduction The basic order of major segment classes in the sonority hierarchy has been by and large unchallenged since Sievers (1881: 157). In this paper we investigate the behaviour of nasal consonants in syllable phonotactics in a survey of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge the perceived wisdom that nasals occupy a relatively low position on the hierarchy, between obstruents and liquids. We find compelling evidence that there are actually two types of nasals, LOW-SONORITY NASALS and HIGH- SONORITY NASALS. Languages allow either both types or just one; if both types are found they may be in complementary distribution, with low-son- ority nasals in syllable onsets and high-sonority nasals in rhymes, or the language may display a contrast between the two types, in which case they are also phonetically distinct.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Sonority Levels of Fricatives and Stops
    See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/275773613 On the sonority levels of fricatives and stops ARTICLE in THE MENTAL LEXICON · JANUARY 2015 DOI: 10.1075/ml.10.1.04len READS 19 2 AUTHORS, INCLUDING: Iris Berent Northeastern University 62 PUBLICATIONS 1,120 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Available from: Iris Berent Retrieved on: 22 October 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company This is a contribution from The Mental Lexicon 10:1 © 2015. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible only to members (students and faculty) of the author’s/s’ institute. It is not permitted to post this PDF on the internet, or to share it on sites such as Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu. Please see our rights policy on https://benjamins.com/#authors/rightspolicy For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com On the sonority levels of fricatives and stops Tracy Lennertz and Iris Berent Northeastern University Across languages, stop-sonorant onsets are preferred to fricative-sonorant ones (e.g., pna ≻ fna), suggesting that stop-initial onsets are better formed.
    [Show full text]
  • A Cue-Based Approach to the Phonotactics of Upper Necaxa Totonac
    A Cue-Based Approach to the Phonotactics of Upper Necaxa Totonac Robert Kirchner & Eleni Varelas University of Alberta In this paper we extend Steriade’s (1999) Licensing-by-Cue approach to the phonotactics of Upper Necaxa Totonac, a member of the Totonacan-Tepehuan language family, spoken in Puebla State, Mexico (Beck 2001). We argue that a number of phonotactic generalizations in this language are problematic for a standard sonority-based account, but are straightforwardly accounted for in terms of Licensing-by-Cue. 1. Problems with sonority 1.1. Sonority sequencing in syllabification. The notion of sonority sequencing has long played a central role in analyses of phonotactic patterns and related phonological processes. That is, many phonotactic generalizations are standardly accounted for in terms of a set of constraints requiring segments to be sequenced within syllables according to a “sonority cycle,” rising sharply in sonority from the beginning towards the nucleus, and falling in sonority within the coda, if any. To take a familiar example, the well-formedness of [blIk] as a possible word of English, vs. *[bnIk] (and *[lbIk]), is attributable to a requirement that English onset clusters rise by a distance of at least two steps on the following sonority scale: vowel > glide > liquid > nasal > obstruent (Clements 1990). [blIk] satisfies this Sonority Sequencing and distance requirement (obstruent-to-liquid); while *[bnIk] has an insufficient sonority distance (obstruent-to-nasal), and *[lbIk] has a sonority fall. Despite its widespread deployment, however, the principle of Sonority Sequencing has always been problematic. Firstly, the sonority scale, though it corresponds loosely to acoustic intensity, and degree of constriction, has no straightforward phonetic definition.
    [Show full text]
  • The Role of Sonority in Jargonaphasia. Sarah Slack Christman Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1990 The Role of Sonority in Jargonaphasia. Sarah Slack Christman Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Christman, Sarah Slack, "The Role of Sonority in Jargonaphasia." (1990). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5041. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5041 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps.
    [Show full text]