Bruce Hayes LabPhon 7 UCLA 1 July, 2000 The Phonetics-Phonology Interface: A Brief Orientation 1. Primary Bifurcation • Phonetically guided phonological research • Phonologically-guided phonetic research PHONETICALLY GUIDED PHONOLOGICAL RESEARCH 2. Functionalist Perspective The sound patterns of language are an instance of “good design,” implementing principles of • Ease of articulation • Distinctness of contrasting forms in perception 3. Examples • Aerodynamic explanation of why various languages that allow geminates, and allow voiced obstruents, don’t allow geminate voiced obstruents (Ohala 1983). • Steriade’s (1993) explanation for why retroflexes are characteristically limited to postvocalic position: tongue-tip sliding during closure, with resulting superiority of VC formant transitions. 4. The “Who’s in Charge?” Question • What is the mechanism whereby phonological patterns are rendered phonetically natural? At least five answers (I-V): 5. I. “Accidents Plus Phonological Reinterpretation” (Ohala 1981) • Phonetic realization is essentially a physical process, with random (not teleological) variation. • Variation is misinterpreted and restructured within the phonological system, which is otherwise insensitive to phonetic principles. • Example: interpretation of coarticulation with /b/ in [bØ] as rounding, hence shift to [bu]. 6. II: Teleological Phonetics, Arbitrary Phonology (Blevins 1999) • The system of phonetic realization is exquisitely designed to balance considerations of articulation and perception (work of Bjorn Lindblom) The Phonetics-Phonology Interface: A Brief Orientation p. 2 • The phonological system is not “well designed” for phonetic naturalness, but is the result of historical restructuring of natural phonetic phenomena. (Blevins and Garrett 1998) • Example: the very strange syllable canon of Romagnolo Italian (Baroni 1999), resulting from an entirely expected series of phonetic changes. 7. Phonetically-Driven Phonology • The principles of phonology do embody functional phonetic criteria. • This has resulted in part from the widespread adoption of constraint-based approaches in phonology such as Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), which force the issue of what is a principled phonological constraint. • III: Approaches Based on Highly-Detailed Representations ¾ Phonological representations are not schematic and categorical, but very rich, embodying phonetics in a direct and vivid way: they include formant transitions, consonant releases, etc. Work of Steriade (1993), Pierrehumbert/Beckman/Ladd (in press), Flemming (1995), Boersma (1998), Kirchner (1998), others. ¾ Example: near-neutralizing final devoicing in German etc., as neutralization of some, but not all, of the many features that together manifest the intuitive opposition [voice] (Steriade 1999). • IV: Approaches Based on “Conventional” Representations + Learning ¾ Phonological representations involve categories and are not fully concrete. ¾ Children, monitoring their own sense of articulatory and perceptual difficulty, use this information to fabricate phonological constraints that embody phonetic criteria (Hayes 1999). ¾ Idea: account for the characteristic symmetry of phonology in the face of asymmetries and trade-offs in its phonetic base. ¾ Example: avoidance phenomena; e.g. child knows but systematically avoids words with phonological configurations that are phonetically difficult. • V: Innatist Approaches ¾ Our genes specify an inventory of constraints that embody innate knowledge of what is phonetically natural. ¾ There is little overlap (to my knowledge) between {scholars who take strong innatist views} and {scholars interested in phonetic explanation of phonological phenomena}. p. 3 Hayes PHONOLOGICALLY-GUIDED PHONETIC RESEARCH 8. Goal • Describe phonetic phenomena using a formalized phonological theory as a basis. Phonology: ¾ Serves as an organizing principle for phonetic implementation ¾ Interfaces phonetics to other linguistic domains. 9. Example: The Phonological Hypotheses of ToBIology References: Bruce 1977, Pierrehumbert 1980, Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988, Ladd 1996 • Pitch contours are not unanalyzable gestalts, but derive from sequential representations: ¾ Phonological tones, occurring at linguistically significant locations ¾ Phonetic tonal targets, which interpret tones in pitch/time ¾ Phonetic interpolation between targets to form whole contours. • There is a hierarchy of levels of phonological phrasing; derivable by partly language- specific principles/constraints. Bases for phrasing: syntax, focus, phrase length, speaking rate. • Docking sites for tone: lexically-specified moras (Japanese), stressed syllables (English), left and right edges in the phrasal hierarchy (most/all languages). 10. Converging Evidence for the ToBIological Approach • Studies of the relative pitch scaling of tones under differing degrees of emphasis indicate they obey mathematically-statable laws; with better fits for tonal targets than tonal changes (Liberman and Pierrehumbert 1984). • Studies of the alignment of contours against phonetic material (Arvaniti et al. 1998, Ladd et al. 1999) have found cases in which alignment is target-governed (as opposed to constant-slope, constant-duration, etc.). • The tone sequences are not arbitrary, but constrained; describable by a tonal grammar (Pierrehumbert 1980: 29; Hayes and Lahiri 1991: 81). • Segmental sandhi processes are blocked at various junctural locations. These blocking effects diagnose a hierarchy that is the same hierarchy as the intonationally-diagnosed one (Hayes and Lahiri 1991, Jun 1996). • Tones/tone sequences can be analyzed as morphemes that have identifiable pragmatic content (Gussenhoven 1984, Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1987). • The tones are often distributed in ways that are iconic with respect to morphosyntax: e.g. in Bengali the rightmost L* … HP sequence marks the beginning and end of a focused constituent. The Phonetics-Phonology Interface: A Brief Orientation p. 4 11. Methodological Creed: Converging Evidence is a Good Thing! • Structure that is not directly observable is crucial to scientific understanding of language, but • Precisely because it is unobservable, we should insist on converging sources of evidence before taking such structures too seriously… 12. A Case Where the Evidence Didn’t Converge: The Moraic Theory of Weight References: Hyman (1985), McCarthy and Prince (1986), Hayes (1989) • Claim: all languages with heavy/light distinctions pick a criterion of weight: CVC, CVÛ vs. CV; CVÛ, CVR1 vs. CVO, CV; others. • This serves as a structural organizing principle: all the processes of the language that refer to weight refer to the same weight criterion (because they refer to structure, and structure encodes only that criterion). • Gordon (1999): surveyed ca. 400 languages, looking for cases where more than one process refers to weight. • Results: ¾ There is no more agreement (cross-process, within-language) than would be expected by chance. ¾ But there are significant connections between process and weight criterion (e.g. tone: CVÛ, CVR heavy), connections that have a plausible phonetic explanation. 13. The Merits of Converging Evidence • The obvious point of avoiding circularity: “CVÛ, CVR syllables heavy in this language because they can host contour tones; and they can host contour tones because they are heavy.” • The slightly-less obvious point: appeals to phonetic naturalness can give us novel solutions where the representational hypothesis fails to hold up. 14. This Session’s Papers • Include work on both phonetically-guided phonology and phonologically-guided phonetics. • Represent a variety of opinions on the role of phonology in phonetics and vice versa. References for this talk are posted at http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/hayes/ 1 R stands for a sonorant consonant. p. 5 Hayes Arvaniti, Amalia, D. Robert Ladd, Ineke Mennen (1998) “Stability of tonal alignment: the case of Greek prenuclear accents,” Journal of Phonetics 26, 3-25. Baroni, Marco (1999) “How do languages get crazy constraints?,” ms., Department of Linguistics, UCLA. Blevins, Juliette (1999) paper given at the Berkeley Phonology Workshop, December 1999. Boersma, Paul (1998) Functional Phonology, Holland Academic Graphics, The Hague. Bruce, Gösta (1977) Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective, Gleerup, Lund. Flemming, Edward (1995) Perceptual features in phonology, Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA. Gordon, Matthew (1999) Syllable Weight: Phonetics, Phonology, and Typology, Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA. Gussenhoven, Carlos (1984) On the Grammar and Semantics of Sentence Accents, Foris, Dordrecht. Hayes, Bruce (1989) “Compensatory Lengthening in Moraic Phonology,” Linguistic Inquiry 20, 253-306. Hayes, Bruce (1999) “Phonetically-Driven Phonology: The Role of Optimality Theory and Inductive Grounding,” in Michael Darnell, Edith Moravscik, Michael Noonan, Frederick Newmeyer, and Kathleen Wheatly, eds., Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics, Volume I: General Papers, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 243-285. Hayes, Bruce and Aditi Lahiri (1991) “Bengali Intonational Phonology,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 9, 47-96. Hyman, Larry (1985) A Theory of Phonological Weight, Foris, Dordrecht. Jun, Sun-Ah (1996) The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody: intonational phonology and prosodic structure, Garland Publishing Inc., New York: NY Kirchner, Robert (1998) Lenition in Phonetically-Based Optimality Theory, Ph.D. dissertation,