Re: THEORY: Feature geometry for uvulars/pharyngeals

Julien Eychenne sikyal:

> 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.
I have this book--and this is the very article from which I drew my first
two responses! I agree that this is an excellent resource, as is the enire
volume.

> 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.
This is the general schema that I have been using. It seems quite
reasonable to separate Place into Oral and [pharyngeal].

>   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 ?
Ah. The section on this in Clements and Hume is very brief, and if they
mention how to distinguish uvulars from velars I must have missed it. This
does seem like a good solution, as it allows for natural classes of
uvulars and pharyngeals or of uvulars and velars.

> I don't know whether it is of interest, but here is how I would do, in
> an element-based framework :
> [snip interesting example]
I have never studied element-based phonology, but my general impressions
of it are negative . . . I'm most likely being unfair.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

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And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
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