THE EMERGENCE OF DISTINCTIVE FEATURES DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jeff Mielke, B.A., B.A., M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Elizabeth Hume, Adviser Professor Keith Johnson ___________________________________ Professor Brian Joseph Adviser Linguistics Graduate Program ABSTRACT Since the mid 20th century, distinctive features have been widely assumed to be part of Universal Grammar. While the theory of innate features predicts that a small set of distinctive features can describe most if not all natural classes, this prediction has never been explicitly tested. The usefulness of distinctive features in phonological analysis is clear from decades of research, but demonstrating that features are innate and universal rather than learned and language-specific requires a different kind of evidence. This dissertation presents the results of the first large-scale crosslinguistic survey of natural classes. Based on data from 561 languages, the survey reveals that unnatural classes are widespread: among 6077 unique classes of sounds which are targets or triggers of phonological processes, analyzed in three popular feature theories (Preliminaries, Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1954; SPE, Chomsky and Halle 1968; and Unified Feature Theory, Clements and Hume 1995), no single theory is able to characterize more than 71% of the classes, and over 24% are not characterizable in any of the theories. While other theories are able to account for specific subsets of these classes, none is able to predict the wide range of classes which actually occur and recur. Even so, many approaches to innate features allow for the existence of unnatural classes as idiosyncrasies or historical oddities. However, it is shown in this dissertation that there is no objective way to partition classes into natural and idiosyncratic categories. ii Many apparently unnatural classes recur in multiple languages, and ranking classes according to frequency results in a bell-like distribution which slopes gently from the common classes which are easily described in phonetic terms and easily characterized in traditional phonetically-defined features, all the way down to the rare classes which occur only once in the survey. Not only is there no visible boundary between the natural and the unnatural, the two are interleaved, with some of the most common unnatural classes being more frequent than most natural classes, and with the vast majority of the natural classes which are predicted by combining distinctive features completely unattested. While many unnatural classes are describable as the union of two natural classes, the most common of the classes which can be analyzed in this way are composed of phonetically-similar segments, but analyzable only as the union of classes which are very rare on their own, casting doubt on the idea that they are simply the result of the cooccurrence of classes predicted by the theory. Even without these findings, there are many reasons to be suspicious of the idea that distinctive features are innate. Humans have been evolving (separate from other primates) for a relatively short time. For all distinctive features, including the uncommon ones, to have emerged in the human genome, humans must have been exposed to contrasts motivating all of them at some time before the life of a common ancestor of all modern humans who would have all these features (all humans). This includes the distinctive features for sign languages, which appear to use entirely different iii phonological features and feature organization (e.g., Brentari 1998, Corina and Sagey 1989, Sandler 1989), even though deafness is generally not hereditary. All of this evidence, along with the survey results, point to the conclusion that the distinctive features used in language are learned rather than innate. Many different types of explanation are available to account for all the ways in which sounds may be grouped together. As is shown, sounds may be grouped together as a result of their shared participation in a sound change, and others can be attributed to phonetically-based generalizations. It is seen that the segments which are the most fickle in their patterning crosslinguistically are those whose phonetic cues are the most ambiguous, regardless of the features traditionally used to define them. These sources predict that classes will tend to involve phonetically similar segments, and the use of phonetically-defined distinctive features is just one way to describe classes of phonetically similar segments. While these types of explanations are often invoked to account for “idiosyncratic” unnatural classes, it is shown that they are even better at accounting for “natural” classes, and the result is a unified account of what were previously considered to be natural and unnatural classes. iv Dedicated to Sara J. Mielke v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, Beth Hume, Keith Johnson, and Brian Joseph, for cultivating my interest in phonological theory, phonetics, and historical linguistics, and inspiring me to try to believe in them all at the same time. Beth and Keith more or less taught me how to be a linguist in our Perception in Phonology seminars in 1999-2000, and Brian planted thoughts in my head over the years which re-emerged in 2002 as part of a dissertation topic. The research was funded by a Presidential Fellowship from OSU and teaching and research assistantships in the OSU Linguistics Department. All of the ideas put forth here were collected in the course of working in the linguistics community at Ohio State, and traveling to conferences, which was generously paid for out of the department ‘s Language Files fund. My dissertation topic first dawned on me at the 2002 MOT phonology workshop at McGill, and crystalized later that year somewhere on I-80 in Pennsylvania, with the help of Giorgos Tserdanelis, when we made the drive from Columbus to New Haven for LabPhon. I have had the good fortune to be able to discuss this stuff with other students at OSU, including Robin Dautricourt, Kathleen Currie Hall, Grant McGuire, Anton Rytting, Tom Stewart, and Steve Winters. Mike Armstrong was a great help in converting my survey data to a searchable format, and Wes Davidson helped vi me at a crucial point with lattices. Chris Brew helped me get the phonetic similarity model on the right track. I have benefited much from talking about features and phonological patterns with Mary Beckman, Nick Clements, Dave Odden, Doug Pulleyblank, Janet Pierrehumbert, Donca Steriade, and Andy Wedel, and this dissertation would have been a lot harder to write without the help of Scott Myers, Keren Rice, and Donca Steriade. I am also grateful for the hundreds of linguists who wrote the descriptive grammars that supplied the data for my survey, to the folks at SIL for making Ethnologue, and to the Ohio State University and the people of Ohio for funding my research. A whole lot of people were instrumental in making it possible for me even to be in the position to write a dissertation. The earliest part of my graduate school experience was dominated by the death of my wife, and I am most grateful to Beth Hume not only for being the best academic advisor I can imagine, but for somehow knowing what to do with a 22-year-old widowed graduate student. Beth (and Keith) kept me busy working on the ICPhS satellite meeting in 1999, when I needed to be kept busy, got me started on my Turkish /h/ deletion project when I needed a project to get started on, and then let me do my own thing. I owe much of my current emotional health to friends I didn’t know six years ago, including Paul Davis, Vanessa Metcalf, Jason Packer, Andrea Sims, and especially Robin Dodsworth, and my dog Hudson. Pat Hammel, my neighbor and landlord, went above vii and beyond the call of duty, and assured that every landlord I have from now on will seem completely inadequate and uninspiring. Oxley 225 has been my home away from home for the past five years, and that has been all the more pleasant since I have been able to share it with Hope Dawson, Shelome Gooden, Crystal Nakatsu, Na’im Tyson, and a bunch of other people, including some already mentioned above. I am most indebted to my parents, Rich and Marilee Mielke, and my sister Alison, for their love and support, and for putting me in a position where it was possible to go to college and graduate school. And I am grateful to Rick, Sheri, Lindsay, Erica, and Kelly Backous for their continued support. Finally, I am indebted to Sara, who was my wife when we moved to Ohio so that I could study linguistics, and who died in a car accident on her way home from work nine months later. This dissertation is dedicated to her. viii VITA August 16, 1976 ………………………....... Born – Vancouver, WA 1997 ……………………………………….. B.A. Linguistics, University of Washington 1997 ……………………………………….. B.A. Japanese, University of Washington 1999 ……………………………………….. M.A. Linguistics, The Ohio State University 1998 – present ……………………………... Graduate Teaching or Research Associate or Fellow, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS 1. Mielke, Jeff (2003) The Interplay of Speech Perception and Phonology: Experimental Evidence from Turkish. Phonetica 60.3: 208-229. 2. Mielke, Jeff (2003) The Diachronic Influence of Perception: Experimental Evidence from Turkish. Proceedings of BLS 29. 3. Mielke, Jeff, Mike Armstrong, and Elizabeth Hume (2003) Looking through opacity. Theoretical Linguistics 29.1-2: 123-139. 4. Mielke, Jeff (2002) Turkish /h/ deletion: evidence for the interplay of speech perception and phonology. In Hirotani, M. (ed.) Proceedings of NELS 32. Amherst, Mass.: GLSA. 383-402. 5. Mielke, Jeff (2002) Turkish /h/ deletion: evidence for the interplay of speech perception and phonology.