Re: THEORY: phonemics (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum

And Rosta <a-rosta@...> wrote:

>Mike:
>> I also considered this.  In addition, it might be argued that
>> the style and register that And mentioned that result in an
>> allophony truly defined by extension are actually signifying two
>> different languages, and thus it might actually be possible to
>> define allophony by underspecification after all.  I didn't
>> initially push this because it seems to rely a bit too much on
>> hairsplitting.  Moreover, in order to confirm the idea of
>> universal underspecified allophony, it seems to me that a broad
>> and very detailed survey of languages would need to be undertaken,
>> and all that would be required to disprove the whole idea is one
>> counterexample.  I did not want to claim that such a counterexample
>> does not exist, thus my conservative demeanor.  Also, an arguably
>> bigger problem is explaining why it is that a speaker who does
>> not use the aforementioned styles and registers might have little
>> difficulty *hearing* the allophones.  That leads me to my main
>> point.
>
>It is very refreshing to have so conservative an interlocutor in
>a debate such as this!
Always :-)


>Anyway, in the message where I replied to John, I mentioned vowel
>allophony as perhaps less amenable to the underspecificational
>approach. E.g. the GOAT, GATE, LOUT, LIGHT diphthongs in British
>accents, where there is so much variation in many regions that
>it is hard to define a canonical target realization.
Agreed that vowels are more difficult to pattern, especially
across the patchwork of accents, but I think even here there
is evidence of a pattern, namely the glides.  At any rate, I don't
dispute that extensional allophony exists.


>> For what it's worth, it just dawned on me that there might well
>> be two ways to define a phoneme: productively and perceptually.
>> The productive definition of phoneme would entail the normal
>> allophones used when uttering the phoneme; the perceptual
>> definition would define the allophones that will be heard
>> by the same speaker or speech community as belonging to a phoneme.
>> The productive set will always be a subset of the perceptual set.
>> For example, I basically never will render intervocalic /t/ as [?],
>> but that presents no difficulty for me in hearing [?] as /t/ in
>> that position.  If we accept the broader perceptual definition
>> of phoneme as being basic, then the stance that in some cases
>> allophony can be defined only extensionally seems a bit stronger.
>
>I would have thought that both production and perception could
>be adequately modelled (in general, not necessarily exceptionlessly)
>by defining one or more prototypical allophones, so that the degree
>to which a given phone counts as an instance of a given phoneme
>is proportional to how near it is to the prototype allophone.
>
>--And.
This is basically as I see it too.  However, what I am speculating
about is the fact that, when he is producing his own speech,
a speaker will select from a set of allophones much narrower than
the one he uses (and needs) to perceive speech.  In other words,
he speaks his own personal accent pretty consistently, while
at the same time having little or no trouble hearing other
accents.  The question I am posing here is, which set of allophones
do you use to define a particular phoneme for that speaker--do
you say that it is his productive set, or his perceptual set,
that is the true definition for the phoneme in his idiolect?

To use my own idiolect as an example, assume for a moment that
although I never say [?] for intervocalic /t/, I also never fail
to hear [?] for intervocalic /t/ when pronounced that way by
others.  For my own idiolect, would you say that [?] is part of
the intervocalic phoneme /t/ for my idiolect (even though I never
say it), or no it isn't (even though I always hear it)?  Or do
you say there are different definitions in different contexts?


Regards

Reply