Re: THEORY: phonemics (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum number of symbols

>1. I reject the classical notion of a phoneme inventory, because there
are
>different sets of contrasting segments for different phonotactic
positions
>(e.g. syllable-initial and syllable-final). Criteria for identifying
>members of different sets with one another rest on a set of rather
>woolly criteria involving some notion of phonetic similarity or details
>of morphological alternations. If the phoneme inventory is to be
>established
>by rigid application of the principle of contrast, then the total
>phoneme inventory should consist of the separate inventories for
>the different phonotactic positions, with phonotactic position treated
>as a phonological feature of each phoneme.
Oh, that is really interesting, but I think your analysis rely on a very
old conception of phonology. Of course, At the earlier developments of
phonology, the phoneme was the ultimate unit. But, if you consider
Chomsky and Halle's model of phonology (that no one would seriously use
nowadays), you will see that the last phonological unit is not the
phoneme but the feature. Now there are theories (like dependency
phonology) who reject the notion of feature, and prefer notions like
elements or particles.

Your proposal is really interesting in treating position as a feature,
but I think it would be redundant. Why encode as a feature an
information that you can easily deduce from the syllable position? And
there would be several problems, in such cases :
Southern French "ourse blanche" "white female bear" pronounced either as
[uR.s@.bl~a.S@] or[u.Rs@.bl~a.S@] The [R] has no fixed position in the
syllable tree, so you cannot give it a featural status. A good
representation in my opinion is to treat this consonant as floating in
the underlying representation, as almost phonologist would do now to
take account for French liaison or Sanskrit sandhi.

More over, I want to point out that if you treat each context as
distinct from others and with no "interrelations", then phonology will
not predict anything at all. I mean, if phonology has just to notice
that these sounds appear in this context, those in that context and so
on, then every thing is already done in phonology, but we then cannot
hope to offer good generalizations, a hole view of how system organize
themselves.
>
>2. The more usual objection to phonemics (as I gather most of us know;
>please don't take my explanation to be patronizing) is that it overly
>privileges the segment. A full analysis of a phonological structure
>requires recognizing elements both below the level of the segment (i.e.
>structure internal to the segment) and above the level of the segment
>(e.g. at rime, syllable, foot level). So, to answer Julien, the
>validity of the segment is not being denied; what is being denied
>is its privileged, 'emic', status. To my mind, Julien wrongly
>takes 'phoneme' to mean 'phonological segment'; 'phoneme' carries
>extra theoretical baggage with it.
I must certainly have been not clear because I assume that (as far as I
know about phonology) there is no doubt by now that phoneme is not the
ultimate phonological unit. As I told in the preceding message, Theories
like autosegmental or three-dimensional phonologies clearly demonstrated
that we needed to separate different tiers in the underlying
representations : this new way of representing sounds allows deeper
analysises and they can take account for prosodic phenomena.
So I hope I managed to explain clerly what I wanted to say :)

Bye, Julien

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