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Re: THEORY: Feature geometry for uvulars/pharyngeals

From:Julien Eychenne <je@...>
Date:Friday, June 27, 2003, 12:28
Hi,

JS Bangs a écrit :
> Hey, linguists and well-read amateurs: > > I've been poking around for a while, and I'm really stymied trying to find > out how to fit uvulars and pharyngeals into a feature geometric system. > I've gotten a couple of fragmentary descriptions from here and there, but > nothing very conclusive or helpful. The best I can get is that there's two > possibilities: > > A privative feature [pharyngeal] under the Place node (but what about > distinguishing uvulars from pharyngeals?).
You're right, it's a true problem. > A Guttural node that dominates Larynx (specifying voice, > spread/constricted glottis, etc) and Tongue Root, which somehow works to > specify ATR and pharyngeality. This is the way Halle represents laryngeals. There is an excellent article about feature geometry in _The Handbook of Phonological Theory_, edited by John Goldsmith. This article is _Internal Organization of Speech Sounds_ by Clements and Hume. Clements is the first one who proposed geometric representations (1985 I think, but not absolutely sure). They present another way to do it, wich is an idea of McCarthy. Instead of having a place node dominating [labial], [coronal], [dorsal], and [pharyngeal], he proposes that Place dominates an oral node which it the sister of the [pharyngeal] feature. The oral node dominates [labial], [coronal], and [dorsal]. .....................PLACE ..................../........\ ................../............\ ................/................\ ............ORAL........[pharyngeal] .........../...|...\ ..[labial]...|.....\ ........[coronal]..\ ................... [dorsal] The good point is that distinguishing pharyngeals from uvualars is then straightforward : the former have just the [pharyngeal] feature, while the latter have both [dorsal] and [pharyngeal]. Thus, pharyngeals can be more transparent to phonological processes as they have no ORAL feature. Maybe it could be what you need ? I don't know whether it is of interest, but here is how I would do, in an element-based framework : in elemental models, both uvulars and pharyngeals have an element (or component, or unary feature, or whatever) |A|. In uvulars, it is an operator (just present in the segmental expression) while it is the head in pharyngeals. Pharyngeals are somehow "more |A|" than uvulars. Example : [X] (uvular voiceless fricative) = |h, A| (friction and pharyngeality, where friction is the most important) and [X\] (pharyngeal voiceless fricative) = |A, h| (pharyngeality and friction, where pharyngeality is the most important). My representation would be : [X] = HEAD(h,(A,h)) and [X\] = HEAD(A,(A,h)) where HEAD(x,y) means : the element x is the head of the segment y, and x belongs to y. Best regards, Julien.

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JS Bangs <jaspax@...>