Re: Allophone Problem

Roger Mills wrote:
>This is the old Bi-uniqueness Problem of classical Phonemics:  1) given a
>phonemic form, the phonetic form must be predictable, and 2) given a
>phonetic form, the phonemic form must be predictable. Thus the problem with
>e.g. German [bUnt] =? bunt 'colored' or Bund 'association'; and oddities
>like Engl. house ~houses [haUz@z], vs. most (all?) other words with a /-s/
>that doesn't voice in the plural.
I actually recall reading that the final devoicing of stops in German is only a
near-merger - that there's some slight phonetic cue that's basically impossible
to hear, but appears regularly when recordings are examined rigorously. A
similar scenario might apply here, too. Frex the [v] in [niva] might be slightly
palatalized in comparision to [neva], and we could then declare that
there's /v/ = [v v_j], and /f/ = [f v]. [v] would however still be the realization
of two different phonemes then. (Andreas just posted last week about a
similar issue in Swedish, and suggested preferring to consider the same phones
also the same phonemes.)


>The cop-out :-) analysis is simply to say: there's this vowel [e] that's
>phonemic (or contrastive) only under two conditions: presence of a vowel
>suffix, and intervocalic C-voicing.
>
>That ought to raise red flags-- conditions usually indicate that something
>predictable is going on, and the forms are not a true minimal pair.
Whatever a "true minimal pair" may mean - they might (with my abov caveat)
still be a phone*T*ical minimal pair.


>(Similarly, if houses::kisses [haUz@z : kIs@z] was our best evidence for the
>s:z contrast in Engl. it would be suspicious for similar reasons --1)
>morpheme boundary 2) presence of apparently irreg. voicing in 'houses', as
>evidenced by the larger number of [-s# ~ -s+@s] forms.
Speaking of irregular voicing, shouldn't phonological rules - synchronical ones,
to boot - that apply irregularly raise even bigger red flags about the validity of
these rules in the first place? For another English example, if there were
random exceptions to the rule of stops being aspirated initially, it would seem
like grounds to consider English to have developed a phonemical aspiration
contrast. I'm not sure if you mean something like this anyway, however.

And I forgot to mention this in my last message, but if there's medial voicing
but also independant voiced sounds, I'd consider the alternation
morphophonemic anyway. Giv'n some other context where vowel alterations
don't come into the play, say [naf] <> [nav] <> [nava], it wouldn't make
sense to me to analyze the last form as /nafa/, even if it had the same root as
[naf]. Or is there some principle about phonemical conditioning being
preferrable to morphological conditioning when both analyses are possible, that
I don't kno about? I'm just an amateur after all. :)

John Vertical

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