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

-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU] On
Behalf Of And Rosta
Sent: mardi 21 mai 2002 21:43
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
Subject: Re: THEORY: phonemics (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum number of
symbols

Julien:

>> 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.
>
>Incidentally, I would make a distinction between what I espouse
>under (1) above, which correctly captures the set of combinatorial
>units that form words' shapes, and more advanced phonological
>theory that is attempting to deal with a much larger range of
>explananda (even to the point of neglecting the criterion of
>lexical contrastiveness). The complex and elaborated theories
>of modern formal linguistics do not entirely supplant in our
>philosophy the methods and analyses of classical structuralism.
OK, I now understand your position.


>> 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?
>
>You are quite right. What I meant is that if you wish to preserve
>the notion from phonemics that the phonology can be stated in terms
>of a phoneme inventory plus a set of phonotactic rules, then
>position must be treated as a contrastive feature.
Yes, If we think of phonology in that way, this could be stated. But I
think there would be a little problem : features are articulatory (or
acoustic, or sometimes both) parameters, such as [voiced], [tense],
[round] and so on. It would be somehow problematic to use a feature
which is positional and not articulatory. This is what was reproached to
Chomsky and Halle when they used the feature [syllabic] to distinguish
consonants from vowels.  A more convenient way to represent it is to use
syllabic trees where the "nature" of the consonant is deduced from its
position. Of course, this is not "The Truth", but just a theoretical
view, but I think it is a good argument to treat position as a separate
parameter.


>But I agree
>that a better way to look at it is to see not one phoneme
>inventory for the whole language but rather one inventory per
>position.
So would you mean that if a language uses /t/ in initial position but
not in final position, and /s/ in both positions, you would state as a
part of the inventory something like :
[#t], [#k] and [k#] (where # represents the word boundary)
If I understand you (sorry if not) I think (but of course I can be
wrong) that it would be somehow redundant, because this would make the
phoneme inventory grow up exponentially. As a matter of fact, if we
consider each context as different, initial /st/, medium /st/ or final
/sk/, followed /preceded by a vowel, a consonant, which one? ... we
would maybe have 5, or 6 or maybe more phonemes /s/, assuming that each
context can influence the phoneme. Please tell me if I misunderstood
you.


>> 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.
>Good point. I don't know the rationale for the French syllabifications
>you cite, but I can give you analogous examples from English:
>_William_  [wIwj@m] or [wIl(i)j@m]
>_failure_  [f&oj@]  or [f&Il(i)j@]
>... where the difference in realization depends on whether or not the
>/l/ is part of the onset of the second syllable.
>
>The proper way to analyse this is to see the syllabification of the
>/l/ as unspecified in the representation that encodes lexically
>contrastive phonology. But if we were to stick with the 'revised
>phoneme theory' I sketched, then I think the way to go would be to
>define some sort of archiphonemic /l/ unspecified for position.
Ok, and thank you for these examples in English, I didn't know it was
possible too.

>> 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.
>
>Maybe yes, maybe no. But for some purposes a principled but
unexplanatory
>description is better than an unprincipled but explanatory one. This is
>the point I was trying to make above about modern and structuralist
>approaches.
You're right, and this is why I misunderstood you. Please excuse me.


>> 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.
>Correct, but this is a rejection of the phoneme. Your statement could
>be rephrased as "there is no doubt by now that the phoneme is not a
>valid phonological construct", since part of the definition of the
>phoneme is that it is the ultimate phonological unit.
The atom used to be described as the ultimate particle, and that is
precisely why it id called a-tom. Then scientists discovered there were
smaller particles such as electron, proton... Now they are talking about
quarks, but this does not mean they reject the concept of the atom, they
just have now a more precise idea of its internal structure and of its
role in the theory. I think it is the same for the phoneme. Phonologists
have a more precise idea of what the phoneme is, a less "monolithic
view" as I said in another post, but I don't think they would all reject
the phoneme at all.


>> 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 clearly what I wanted to say :)
>
>I understand you and don't disagree with you. I gather that, schooled
>in modern phonology as you are, you too reject the phoneme. Recall
>it was my throwaway line about rejection the phoneme that prompted
>requests for clarification.
>
>--And.
Actually not, as I said above, I just wanted to point out that we can
give explanations of internal (and external) structure without rejecting
the phoneme at all, by just revising its role in the whole theory. But I
now understand what you meant and I am really interested and your
theoretical developments.
Please excuse me if my answer was long and borring.

Best regards,
Julien.

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