West Scandinavian Vowel Systems and the Ordering of Phonological Rules by Stephen R. Anderson B.S., Illinois Institute of Technology (1966) Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy - -- -. at the . Massachusetts Institute of Technology September, 1969 Signature of Author - -- - -- , ... *a. ' -7 Drpartme~tof L.iodern Languages, ['J, 1g.i) .c < lh.gy< ',&;> i' 18 Aug., 1969 Certified by .....dB r .-.-.7-+. q.. .....- ..................... Thesis Supervisor Accepted by .....:....-.........;..............m............. - Chairman, Departmental Committee Archives on Graduate Students West Scandinavian Vowel Systems and the Ordering of Phonological Rules Stephen Robert Anderson Submitted to the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics on 18 August, 1969, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 1 The aim of this work is two-fold: first, to present an analysis of the more important aspects of the vowel phonology of Icelandic and Faroese; and secondly, to make use 02 these and other facts to present a theory of the organization of the phonological component of a generative grammar. This theory is based in lzrge part on that presented by Chomsky and Halle in the Sound Pattern of English, differing from that work nost importantly in allowing the total set of ordering requirements in the grammar to be inconsistent with any possible single linear arrangement. Chapter I presents the basic notion of phonological rules and their interaction. The formal characteristics of a linear ordering are presented, and the alternative theory of local ordering to be defended in this work I descril ed. 1 Chapter I1 is an analysis of some of the more irc7ortant problems of Icelandic phonology. The u-umlaut rule is considered in some detail, and it is concluded that its modern form is essentially the same as its form in Old Norse. The rules of vowel shift and stress shift in -e-diphthongs are among the more important rules presented. Chapter I11 is an analysis of the structure of the vowel system of modern Faroese. The large variety of diphthongs characteristic of the language are shown to be derivable from a simple system of underlying long vowels. The rule which i.nserts glides to break up vowel sequences is con- sidered. The alternation between diphthongs and vowels plus palatal-velar consonants (the verscharfung) is shown to foilow from otherwise-needed rules of the language. Chapter IV discusses the role of the various notational conventions in the the~ryof phonology. Thp variables, braces, and parentheses notations are discussed in terms of their role as evaluatory functions and in terms of the distinction between conjunctive and disjunctive application. The neigh- borhood notation is discussed in some detail, and it is shown that this notation does not determine conjunctive or disjunctive ordering uniquely. An example j.s discussed which indicates the need for an extension of the principle of disjunctive notation beyond the fact of any particular formal similarity of rules. Chapter V considers several examples that support the theory of local ordering as opposed to the theory of linear order. In the course of this discussion, several indeterminacies in the theory are uncovered, and partially resolved. The examples discussed are from Menomini, Kasem, Sanskrit, Turkish, Caddo and French. In connection with these last two, iii Chafe's theory of 'persistent rules' is considered. Throughout the chapter, Kiparsky's n~tionof marked and unmarked order plays a significant role. Chapter VI is a largely inconclusive and incomplete discussion of some of the implications of the theory of local ordering for other parts of linguistic theory. The consequences for Cllomsky and Halle's theory of markedness are considered. Thesis Supervisor: Morris Halle Title: Professor of Linguistics For Kitten, without whom it would never have been possible to complete this; arAd Thor, on account of whom it nearly wasn' t . Table of Contents Page Abstract i i Dedication iv Table of Contents V I11 troduct ion viii Chapter I - Rasic Assumptions 1.1 Phonological rules 1.2 The interaction of rules 1.3 Types of ordering relation 1.4 The crganization of systems of rules Footnotes to Chapter I Chaptcr I1 - The Icelandic Vowel System 11.1 Inventory of vowels 11.2 The u-umlaut rule 11.3 The order of u-umlaut, and Old Norse skaldic verse 11.4 Sketch of the ablaut system 11.5 Breaking 11.6 The i-umlaut rule 11.7 The resulting vowel system Footnotes to Chapter I1 Chapter I11 - The Vowel System of Faroese 111.1 Introduction 111.2 lnventory of vowels 111.3 The glide-epenthesis rule 111.4 The Verschzrf unq 111.5 Some apparent exceptions Footnotes to Chapter I11 Chapter IV - Notational Conventions IV.l Evaluation procedures and notations IV.2 Some exceptional types of ordering IV.3 Iterated application and infinite schemata IV. 4 Neighborhood rules IV. 5 Disjunctive order and the status of notations Footnotes to Chapter IV Chapter V - The Principles of Rule Ordering V.1 Introduction 152 V, 2 Menomini 153 V.3 Kasem 158 V. 4 Grassmann's law in Sanskrit 164 V. 5 Turkish harmony 178 V. 6 Chafe's theory of 'persistent rules ' 190 Footnotes to Chapter V 196 Chapter VI - Local Ordering and Phonological Theory VI.1 Some implications 199 VI.2 The stat- of 'marking conventions ' 201 Footnotes to Chapter VI 210 Eib liography 2 11 Biographical Note 218 vii My own subject, Phonetics, is one which ie useless by itself, while at the same time it is the foundation of all study of language, whether theoretical or practical. Henry Sweet Introduction The title of this work, like aost titles, is deficient in that it sug,g?sts both too much and too little. The use of the term 'West Scandi- navian', in parLicular, is bad -- properly speaking, the West Scandinevian languages are all of those more or less closely derived from Old Norwegian, including Icelandic, Faroese, the dialects of Western Norway that form the basis of modern Landsmgl Norwegian, and the dialects of Old Norse that were spoken in Shetland and in the Orkney Islands up until about the 18th cen- tury. These latter are virtually inaccessible to investigation at this point; there are really no clear written records of the language, and the I dialects investigated by Jacob Jacobsen and others had lost a great many features through contact with Celtic and English. About the only materials f available are contained in Jacobsen's dictionary, which is a compilation of the Norse-based words in the dialect of the 19th century inhabitants; these are very difficult of int~rpretation,and I have simply ignored I Orkney and Shetland Norn in this work. The exclusion of Norwegian is vastiy less defensible, and I can only I claim that to have included it would have involved vastly greater amounts of work without a great deal of light being shed on the problems of Icelandic and Faroese phonology which form the main part of the work. These two languages display many common features, but are sufficiently different to be treated quite independently. One right refer to them (as opposed to Norwegian) as 'insular West Scandinavian', but this would seem to do an injustice to the people of Shetland and Orkney. I must therefore simply state that my treatment of 'West ~candinavian'is restricted to Icelandic and Faroese, with a few glimpses of thc Old Norse that both are related to. In any case, my aim in presenting these discussions of West Scandi- navian has been to provide a basis for the discussion and evaluation of a particular approach LO the organization of a phonological 'description, in particular, of a theory of rule ordering. By discussing the rules whose application supports the ordering assumptions made here within the frame- work of the more or less complete description of a large portion of the phonologies of these two languages, I hope to have made the whole descrip- tion (including the ordering arguments) more plausible. In the later chapters, in which the phonological theory is subjected to a more detailed examination, I have fallen back on the old techuiqlle of discussing a few rules in (artificial) isolation frcm the rest of the language; I hope that the fact that most of the examples chosen are virtual cliches of phono- logical description will make up for their disconnected appearance. The structure of the work is rather similar to that of Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English, and the questions to which it is addressed are much the same as those that occupied that work. If much that is here seems to be nothing but an attack on claims made by Chomsky and Halle, this is perhaps inevitable, and I hope it will not be interpreted simply as iconoclastic. As virtually the first linguists in history to concern them- selves with formulating their claims about the structure of language in such a way as to be empirically confirmable or disconfiruiable, it is natural that much of what goes on in the field today is concerned with the evaluation of Chonsky and ~alle'swork. The points raised so summarily in chapter VI below perhaps indicate a new direction being followed in phono- logy today, one on which Chomsky and Halle have typically gotten the first start, but one in which other investigators have shown considerable independence. Much of what appcars in this book is devotzd to what has gone before, but it a11 seems to b? points that should be gotten clear before going on. Much of the phonological theory of SPE is assumed here. Though some lip service is paid to the idea of motivating phonology from scratch, this is more an expository device than a serious attempt, and the reader completely unfami1:ar with generative phonology will probably not fare too well.