Friction between Phonetics and Phonology The status of affricates Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 5775 Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl ISBN: 978-94-6093-122-2 NUR 616 Copyright © 2013 by Janine Berns. All rights reserved. Friction between Phonetics and Phonology The status of affricates Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. mr. S.C.J.J. Kortmann, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 8 november 2013 om 10.30 uur precies door Janine Katharina Maria Berns geboren op 18 juni 1985 te Kerkrade Promotoren: Prof. dr. Haike Jacobs Prof. dr. Bernard Laks (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense) Manuscriptcommissie: Prof. dr. Anneke Neijt Prof. dr. Barbara Bullock (University of Texas) Prof. dr. Marie-Hélène Côté (University of Ottawa) Prof. dr. Frans Hinskens (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Prof. dr. Jeroen van de Weijer (Shanghai International Studies University) “As a rule,” said Holmes, “the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Red-headed League. (1891) Acknowledgements I would like to dedicate the very first lines of this thesis to my two supervisors, Haike Jacobs and Bernard Laks. Haike, thank you for giving me the freedom to develop my own interests and insights, but also for being there with your enlightening comments when I felt lost or when I was complicating things too much. I hope we can spend our coffee breaks together for a long time! I am very grateful to my long-distance supervisor Bernard Laks for his detailed feedback, for not making me forget some classic references and for fruitful discussions in Paris. I also wish to express my gratitude to the members of my reading committee for their critical and useful comments. It goes without saying that I am extremely thankful to the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) for awarding me a Toptalent grant (project no. 021.002.0250), providing the funding for this PhD project. Without the help of many people, this thesis would never have been the one that it has now become. I am of course the only person to blame for the errors you may come across. I would like to thank the members of the Centre for Language Studies (CLS) of the Radboud University for their help on various points. I am indebted to Joop Kerkhoff for some phonetic advice and for designing PRAAT scripts. I owe a big thank you to the LiTS colleagues (old and new style) for their helpful feedback, and I particularly want to thank Erwin Komen, with whom I have been co-organizing the LiTS talks, for the enjoyable collaboration. Un très grand merci to the members of the PFC project for helping me solve practical issues, for their useful comments on my presentations at various stages of my project, but foremost for creating such a stimulating environment. I absolutely enjoyed working in the department of Romance languages. Thanks to all colleagues for their support and for showing interest in what I was doing. Robbie van Gerwen helped me judge puzzling French recordings, and I am grateful to Dominique Nouveau for useful discussions on present-day phenomena in her mother tongue. The fifth floor of the Erasmus building would never have been so nice without having Marc Smeets and Isabelle Thibaudeau around. Thanks for everything, “dudes”! I will also never forget the recurring Acknowledgements - viii discussions on phonology and literature (and their potential interface) with Franc Schuerewegen. Without my fellow PhD buddies, writing this thesis would definitely have been less fun. Inge Alferink, Eva D’hondt and Rosanne Hebing, thank you for sharing numerous meals, drinks and what not: in short, thanks for so many moments discussing serious and less serious business. I guess it is best not to elaborate on staples, weird German vocabulary, attics or mutated fairy tale characters. Last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank a number of people who are not directly related to daily-university-life. I would like to thank my parents for their support, but also for always letting me keep my feet on the ground and for making me remember that there is more to life than this thesis. Dorine, thank you for helping me check frequency counts on Sunday afternoons. Lieke, thanks for correcting my English. Luc, I am eternally grateful for recovering this thesis from my damaged USB stick. And the very last thank you goes to my friends: I am very happy to be surrounded by such a bunch of nice people! Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................1 1.2 The phonetics of affricates ............................................................................. 2 1.3 One or two phonemes?................................................................................... 5 1.4 The phonological structure of affricates ....................................................... 8 1.5 Research questions and methodology ........................................................... 9 1.6 Outline of the thesis ....................................................................................... 13 PART I: BACKGROUND Chapter 2. The phonological debate 17 2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 17 2.2 Affricates: stops with a release feature ........................................................... 17 2.2.1 Affricates as strident stops ............................................................. 17 2.2.2 Affricates as stops with a delayed release ..................................... 18 2.3 Affricates: combinations of a plosive and a fricative ..................................... 18 2.3.1 Multi-column complex segments .................................................. 19 2.3.2 Contour segments .......................................................................... 21 2.3.3 Complex segments ......................................................................... 23 2.3.4 Aperture theory ............................................................................. 27 2.3.5 Headedness among continuancy features ..................................... 29 2.3.6 One or two nodes? ......................................................................... 31 2.4 Affricates: simplex underlying stops .............................................................. 33 2.4.1 The nonavailability of [+continuant] ............................................ 33 2.4.2 The return of the strident stop ...................................................... 35 2.4.3 Affricates do not exist .................................................................... 39 2.5 The contour segment revisited ....................................................................... 44 2.6 Agreement and disagreement ......................................................................... 45 2.7 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 46 Table of contents - x PART II: TYPOLOGY Chapter 3. Affricates in segment inventories 51 3.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 51 3.2 Preliminaries: typology and sampling ............................................................ 52 3.3 UPSID ............................................................................................................... 54 3.4 From 1 to 24: the distribution of affricates in UPSID ................................... 56 3.5 Place of articulation ........................................................................................ 64 3.6 Voiceless vs. voiced ......................................................................................... 68 3.7 Sibilant vs. non-sibilant .................................................................................. 72 3.7.1 Frequencies of occurrence ............................................................. 72 3.7.2 One or two sibilants ....................................................................... 73 3.7.3 More than two sibilants ................................................................. 76 3.7.4 Contrastive parameters .................................................................. 79 3.7.5 Affricates and sibilant typology .................................................... 82 3.8 Segmental attributes ........................................................................................ 85 3.9 Singleton vs. geminate .................................................................................... 92 3.10 Feature Economy and Maximal Dispersion ................................................. 96 3.11 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 99 Chapter 4. Theoretical implications of typological patterns 101 4.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 101 4.2 Validity of existing arguments ........................................................................ 101 4.2.1 Place of articulation ....................................................................... 101 4.2.2 Segmental modification ................................................................