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Perception, Production, and the Implementation of Phonological Opacity in the Bengali Vowel Chain Shift

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Perception, Production, and the Implementation of Phonological Opacity in the Bengali Vowel Chain Shift Perception, Production, and the Implementation of Phonological Opacity in the Bengali Vowel Chain Shift Traci Nagle, Indiana University, Bloomington ([email protected]) Opaque phonological patterns, such as synchronic chain shifts, pose difficulties for surface-based theoretical analysis and their very existence has been challenged by proponents of natural generative phonology. Yet researchers continue to propose methods to phonologically model such patterns (see, e.g., McCarthy 2007). Bengali exhibits a synchronic vowel-height chain-shift pattern in its verbs, in which low-mid and mid vowels in monosyllabic verb stems alternate with mid and high vowels, respectively (æ~e, e~i, ɔ~o, o~u). The higher alternant of each of these pairs historically co-occurred with a high vowel (i or u) in the adjacent inflectional suffix, the lower alternant co-occurring when the adjacent suffix vowel was non-high. This pattern is presented in the phonological literature and by Bengali linguists as exceptionless (e.g., Thompson, 2010), and it has typically been analyzed as a morpho-phonological process of raising (e.g., Dey, 1979; Lahiri, 2000) or lowering (e.g., Murshid, 1992; Sarkar, 2004) of the stem vowel when it precedes a high suffix vowel. In modern standard Bengali (Kolkata variety), although most of the high vowels in the inflectional suffixes have been lost, the alternations in verb-stem vowels persist. The research reported here aims to investigate the productivity of the vowel-alternation pattern in the most transparent part of the verb paradigm: cases in which the high-vowel suffix trigger is present, as shown in the partial paradigm in (1). (1) Bengali verbs, selected present tense inflections 2nd person (informal) indicative / 1st person indicative imperative 2nd person (formal) imperative rakh-i ‘I/we put’ rakh-o ‘you put’ rakh-un ‘put!’ dekh-i ‘I/we see’ dækh-o ‘you see’ dekh-un ‘look!’ ʃikh-i ‘I/we learn’ ʃekh-o ‘you learn’ ʃikh-un ‘learn!’ kor-i ‘I/we do’ kɔr-o ‘you do’ kor-un ‘do!’ uʈh-i ‘I/we rise’ oʈh-o ‘you rise’ uʈh-un ‘rise!’ The results of three experimental investigations of the perception and production of the vowel chain shift in nonce and real verbs by 18 native speakers reveal that, although Bengali speakers reliably implement the alternation pattern with real verb stimuli, they extend the pattern in nonce verb stimuli at dramatically lower rates (as illustrated in (2) by the results of a production experiment). Results were consistent across the three experimental paradigms and suggest the possibility that this pattern is not evidence of a fully productive phonological process. (2) Rates of implementation of vowel harmony pattern, spoken-response task Real verbs – high Real verbs – lower frequency Nonce verbs Vowel alternation frequency (n =106 ) (n = 125) (n = 328) i ~ e 72% 94% 54% e ~ æ 94% 39%1 46% o ~ ɔ 100% 100% 41% u ~ o 83% 64% 57% Average by verb type 91% 74% 50% Alternatively, the persistence of the stem-vowel alternation could be a manifestation of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (e.g., Öhman, 1966; Przezdziecki, 2005), a possibility explored by comparing vowels produced in real and nonce verbs with vowels produced in real non-verbs (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, et al.). Preliminary analyses using F1 measurements at the midpoint of the first vowel in real and nonce verbs indicate little anticipatory vowel-to-vowel height coarticulation, as 1 Only one verb in the stimulus set that fell into this category (bheɽa ‘to arrive at’); it has several close lexical neighbors, including bheɽa ‘sheep/ram’ and bheɽi ‘sheep/ewe’, which may have influenced the very high number of responses (8 of 10) of the form bheɽo instead of the expected bhæɽo in one of two experimental conditions. illustrated in (3) for the vowel [e] in sets of three words of similar phonetic shape. The differences in vowel height across these categories of words were not significant. (3) F1 measurements of first vowel by word type and shape 500 450 400 F1 350 300 250 verb stem + [i] real CVC + [i] real CVC + [a,e,o] Token type, V1 = [e] The results of these analyses cast doubt on the synchronic productivity of this chain-shift pattern, echoing the results of experimental tests in other languages in which chain shifts resist generalization to nonce words (e.g., Sanders, 2003; Zhang, Lai, & Turnbull-Sailor, 2006). The present results also offer support for some scholars’ skepticism about the nature and learnability of opaque interactions (see, e.g., Bybee Hooper, 1976; Kiparsky, 1973; Mielke, Armstrong, & Hume, 2003) and are consistent with propositions that supposedly opaque phonological patterns may instead be evidence of allomorphy (see, e.g., Bybee 2001). References Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bybee Hooper, J. (1976). An Introduction to Natural Generative Phonology. New York: Academic Press. Dey, P. (1979). On Rule Ordering in Bengali Phonology. Indian Linguistics, 40(1), 24-34. Kiparsky, P. (1973). Phonological Representations. In O. Fujimura (Ed.), Three Dimensions of Linguistic Theory (pp. 1-36). Tokyo: TEC Company. Lahiri, A. (2000). Hierarchical Restructuring in the Creation of Verbal Morphology in Bengali and Germanic: Evidence from Phonology. In A. Lahiri (Ed.), Analogy, levelling, markedness: Principles of change in phonology and morphology (pp. 71-123). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. McCarthy, J.(2007). Hidden Generalizations: Phonological Opacity in Optimality Theory. London: Equinox. Mielke, J., Armstrong, M., & Hume, B. (2003). Looking through Opacity. Theoretical Linguistics, 29, 123-139. Murshid, G. (1992). Bengali-English-Bengali Dictionary. London: Ruposhi Bangla Ltd. Öhman, S. E. G. (1966). Coarticulation in VCV utterances: Spectrographic Measurements. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 39, 151-168. Przezdziecki, M. (2005). Vowel Harmony and Coarticulation in Three Dialects of Yoruba: Phonetics Determining Phonology. Dissertation, Cornell University. Sanders, R. N. (2003). Opacity and Sound Change in the Polish Lexicon. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. Sarkar, P. (2004). Segmental Phonology of Standard Colloquial Bengali. Dissertation, University of Chicago. Thompson, H.-R. (2010). Bengali: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge. Zhang, J., Lai, Y., & Turnbull-Sailor, C. (2006). Wug-Testing the 'Tone Circle' in Taiwanese. Paper presented at the 25th Annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL). .
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