Re: Status of Italian rising

On Sun, 8 Dec 2002 23:47:48 +0100, Mangiat <mangiat@...> wrote:

>Hi!
>
>This is the English translation of a question I'm going to send to my
>teacher of linguistics in the forthcoming future. I'd like you to have a
>look, before... thanks;-) That's abour the status of Italian rising
>diphthongs.
>
>I can't figure out why linguists tend to describe both the components of
>falling diphthongs as vocoids (with high /i/ and /u/ lacking sillabicity),
>while only the second element of rising diphthongs is hold as a vocoid and
>the first one is described as an approximant (a contoid). Turning over the
>problem in my hear I've got to the impression that this solution was
>verbatim imported from descriptions of English and/or German phonologies,
>where it actually makes sense, and exploited to fit the Italian situation-
>which it doesn't fit like a glove.
I don't understand why linguists do some things either!
Aren't approximants vocoids? (well, I know *lateral* approximants have been
considered to be non-vocoids (I assume that's what's meant by "contoid"),
but this has never made sense to me from the purely phonetic viewpoint,
either acoustically or in terms of articulation.) It seems to me that
phonetics and phonology don't have to correspond, and that phonology is
language dependent. Your analysis looks OK to me, though, and I didn't see
anything wrong with your translation.

Jeff J

>Under the functional POV, indeed, only considering [j] and [w] vocoids
>lacking sillabicity not only when they immediately follow the syllabic
>sonority peak (falling diphthongs) but also when they precede it (rising
>diphthongs), would allow us to mantain the traditional simple explanation
>of the conditions governing the allomorphy of masculine determinative
>article:
>[il] and [lo] both show up before contoids (under certain given conditions
>we may skip for our purposes);
>[l] shows up before all of the vocoids, both syllabic
>({ART}+{unico}>['luniko]) and asyllabic ones ({ART}+{uomo}> ['lwO.mo]).
>[u] and [w], as you may see, behave the same way, both as vocoids,
>determining the eligibility of [l] as article. We could consider them
>allophones of the same phoneme /u/, showing up in different syntagmatic
>contexts characterized by two different suprasegmental structure:
>input: /u.ni.ko/ vs. /uO.mo/
>output: [uniko] vs. [wOmo]
>When /u/ is a syllabic nucleus [u] appears; otherwise we get [w].
>
>If we considered [j] and [w] approximants, the abovementioned rule should
>be rewritten, getting a bit less straightforward:
>[il] and [lo] both show up before all of the contoids except the
>approximants /j/ and /w/;
>[l] shows up before all of the vocoids, but also before the approximants
>/j/ and /w/.
>This description would also introduce the distinction between 4 different
>phonemes, /i/, /j/, /u/ and /w/, where 2 (/i/ and /w/) would work.
>
>In English, on the other hand, the conditions governing the allomorphy of
>indeterminative article show that [j] and [i] actually behave differently,
>and they should be considered different phonemes, the former contoid in
>nature, the latter vocoid:
>[@] appears before contoids: {ART}+{yard}> [@ jA:d]; /j/ is a consonant;
>[@n] shows up before vocoids: {ART}+{evening}> [@n i:v@nIN]
>If we considered [j] an allophone of /i/ appearing in some given
>syntagmatic contexts characterized by a particular suprasegmental
>condition similar to the one we postulated for Italian, we'd obtain
> *an yard, which is ill-formed.
>
>Well, this is the first part... I'm working at a second part, which
>includes examples from German, too... but I still have to work about it...
>Comments are obviously welcome! And excuse me for my rough translation...
>
>Luca

Replies