Defectivity in Chaha

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Rose (2000) describes a circumscribed form of defectivity in Chaha, a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. Throughout Ethio-Semitic, many verbs have a frequentative formed using a quadriliteral verbal template. Since few verb roots are quadriconsonantal—most are triconsonantal, some are biconsonantal—a sort of reduplication and/or spreading is used to fill in the template. In Tigryina, for instance (p. 318), the frequentative template is of the form CɘCaCɘC. Then, frequentative of the triconsonantal verb root √/grf/ ‘collect’ is [gɘrarɘf], with the root /r/ repeated, and for a biconsonantal verb root like √/ħt/ ‘ask’, the frequentative is [ħatatɘt], with three root /t/s.

Rose contrasts this state of affairs with Chaha. In this language, the frequentative template CɨCɘCɘC cannot be satisfied by a biconsonantal root like √/tʼm/ ‘bend’ or √/Rd/ ‘burn’, and all such verbs lack a frequentative.¹ The expected *[tʼɨmɘmɘm] and *[nɨdɘdɘd] are ill-formed, as are all other alternatives. Furthermore, no frequentatives of any sort can be formed with quadriconsonantal roots.

Rose notes that there are often semantic reasons for a verb to lack a frequentative (e.g., stative and resultative verbs are generally not compatible with it), this does not seem applicable here.

Endnotes

As Rose explains: “R represents a coronal sonorant which may be realized as [n] or [r] depending on context…” (p. 317).

References

Rose, S. 2000. Multiple correspondence in reduplication. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, pages 315-326.

Deriving the major rule/minor rule distinction

The ability to target underspecified lexemes’ specifications for a rule feature, in which feature-filling is implemented by unification (e.g., Bale et al. 2014), ought to enable us to derive the traditional distinction (e.g., Lakoff 1970) between major rules (those for which non-application is exceptional) and minor rules (those for which application is exceptional), making this distinction purely descriptive of later feature-filling rules inserting unmarked rule features upon lexical insertion.

Let us suppose we have a rule R. Let us suppose that every formative is unified with {+R} upon lexical insertion. Then, unification will fail only with formatives specified [−R], and these formatives will exhibit exceptional non-application. This describes the parade example of exceptions to a major rule: the failure of trisyllabic shortening in obesity (assuming obese is [−trisyllabic shortening]; see Chomsky & Halle 1968: §4.2.2).

Let us suppose instead that every formative is unified with {−R} upon lexical insertion. Then, unification will fail only with those formatives specified [+R], and these formatives will exhibit exceptional application, assuming they otherwise satisfy the phonological description of rule R. This describes minor rules.

This (admittedly quite sketchy at present) idea seems to address Zonneveld’s (1978: 160f.) concern that Lakoff and contemporaries did not posit any way to encode whether or not a rule was major or minor, except “transderivationally” via inspection of successful derivations. This also places the major/minor distinction—correctly, I think—in the scope of theory of productivity. More on this later.

References

Bale, A., Papillon, M., and Reiss, C. 2014. Targeting underspecified segments: a formal analysis of feature-changing and feature-filling rules. Lingua 148: 240-253.
Chomsky, N. and Halle, M. 1968. Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row.
Lakoff, G. 1970. Irregularity in Syntax. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Zonneveld, W. 1978. A Formal Theory of Exceptions in Generative Phonology. Peter de Ridder.

Defectivity in Turkish; part 1: monosyllables

[This is part of a small but growing series of defectivity case studies.]

While there are some languages—like Greek or Russian—in which there are dozens or even hundreds of defective lexemes, in most cases defectivity is markedly constrained, conditioned by both morphological class or status and lexical identity. This is somewhat in conflict with models which view defectivity as essentially “absolute phonotactic ungrammaticality” (e.g., Orgun & Sprouse 1999; henceforth OS), since the generalizations about which items are or are not defective are not primarily phonotactic. A good demonstration of the morphological-lexical nature of defectivity comes from Turkish.

As first reported (to my knowledge) by Itô & Hankamer (1989; henceforth IH) Turkish has just a small number of monosyllabic stems. In verbs, one forms the “simple” (active) imperative using the bare stem: e.g., ye ‘eat!’. However, one cannot form a passive imperative of monosyllabic verbs. For instance, for EAT, we would expect *yen (with -n being the expected allomorph of the passive imperative), but this is apparently ill-formed under the appropriate interpretation, with no obvious alternative.¹ I say it this way because because yen exists as is the simple imperative ‘conquer!’. As IH note, this shows there is nothing phonotactically wrong with the ill-formed passive imperatives. Another example they give is kon ‘alight! (like a bird)’. Apparently, we would expect it to have a passive imperative homophonous with the simple imperative, but it is ill-formed under this interpretation. However, I find these two examples less than convincing since one could imagine that the homophony with another type of imperative might be implicated in these judgments.

Something similar characterizes certain monosyllabic noun stems. Turkish has apparently borrowed the seven solfège syllables do, re, mi, etc. Of these, six are CV monosyllables, which we would expect to select the /-m/ allomorph of the 1sg. poss. suffix. However, these 1sg. poss. forms are apparently ill-formed; e.g., *do-m ‘my do‘, re-m ‘my re‘, *mi-m ‘my mi‘, and so on. However, one can use these with the other declensional suffixes which produce polysyllabic outputs; e.g., 1pl. poss. domuz ‘our do’. The same facts are true for the names of the letters of the (Latin, post-1928) alphabet: e.g., de ‘the letter d’, but *de-m ‘my letter d’, and so on. OS report however that the one CVC solfège syllable, sol, has a well-formed 1sg. poss.; this selects the /-Im/ allomorph (where /I/ is a high vocalic archiphoneme subject to stem-controlled vowel harmony), which gives us the licit 1sg. poss. solüm [solʲym] ‘my sol‘.² The same facts hold of the 2sg. poss. ‘your __’, which for CV monosyllables would be realized as /-n/; e.g., *do-n ‘your do‘.

From the above facts IH and OS conclude there is an exceptionless constraint in Turkish such that monosyllabic derived forms produced by the grammar are ill-formed, with no possible “repair”. However, Selin Alkan (p.c.) draws my attention to at least one CV nominal stem which is well-formed in the 1sg. and 2sg,. poss.: su ‘water. For this stem, a [j] glide is inserted between the vowel and the stem, and the stem selects for the -VC allomorphs of the possessive; e.g., su-y-um ‘my water’, su-y-un ‘their water’. This is surprisingly insofar as OS take pains (p. 195f.) to specifically rule out repair by epenthesis in 1sg. poss. forms!

It would be nice to conclude that the only affected lexemes are transparent borrowings, but this does not seem to accord with the evidence from monosyllabic verbs. But the evidence from native stems is really quite weak, and the generalizations are clearly morphological (i.e., the restriction of the constraint to derived environments) and lexical (i.e., the fact that su has an “escape hatch”), something that has largely been ignored in previous attempts to describe defectivity in Turkish.

To move forward on this topic, it would be nice to know the following. How many, if any, verbs behave like ye or kon, and are any unexpectedly well-formed in the passive imperative? Are there any other forms in the verbal paradigm that show “monosyllabism” gaps? Similarly, how many (if any) defective nouns are there beyond those already mentioned, and how many behave like su?

[h/t: Selin Alkan]

Endnotes

IH note (p. 61, fn. 1) that the passive imperative “are somewhat odd in normal circumstances”. Therefore, they asked their informants to imagine they were directors giving instructions to actors, which apparently helped to render these examples more felicitious.
It seems plausible that -m and -n here are purely-phonological allomorphs of /-Im, -In/ respectively, but I am not sure.

References

Itô, J. and Hankamer, J. 1989. Notes on monosyllabism in Turkish. In J. Itô and J. Runner (ed.), Phonology at Santa Cruz, pages 61-69. Linguistics Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Orgun, C. O. and Sprouse, R. L. 1999. From MPARSE to CONTROL: deriving ungrammaticality. Phonology 16:191-224.

“…phonology is logically (and causally) prior to phonetics.”

Two important consequences follow from this. First, that phonology is logically (and causally) prior to phonetics as here defined. Second, phonology is also epistemologically prior to phonetics. Judgments about phonetic events are invariably made in terms of perceptual phonology. (Hammarberg 1976:356)

In this post I’d like to briefly review a view of the relationship between phonetics and phonology as related by Hammarberg (1976) and Appelbaum (1996), the former being primarily concerned with production and the latter with perception.

Phonetics, being concerned with the material and physical, has tended to align itself with the physical sciences (and physics in particular), and with the empiricist tradition in science.^1,2 In contrast, much of what has been called the cognitive revolution in the cognitive sciences, and in linguistics in particular, is explicitly anti-empiricist. As Hammarberg and Appelbaum argue, the empiricist biases of phonetics make it ill-suited to explain fundamental facts about speech.

It is generally understood that spoken language is not produced as a discrete sequence but rather a series of overlapping gestures and acoustic signatures. Anyone who has looked closely at the acoustics of speech will already recognize that it is impossible to say exactly where, in a word like cat, the [æ]-ness ends and the [t]-ness begins. In a worrd like soon, the fricative portion shows signs of rounding not found in words like scene. From an acoustic record alone, one cannot determine empirically how many segments are present. And, one cannot produce natural-sounding synthesized speech via simple concatenation of segments. It is not just that the [æ, t, s] and other segments are coarticulated with nearby segments, however: it is also the case that there are simply no invariant acoustic-phonetic properties that uniquely characterize [t]. A [t] spoken by a child, by a man with a mouth full of chili, by a woman missing her front teeth, and so on may have radically different acoustic properties, yet we as scientists understand them to be in some sense identical phenomena.

This is a basic principle of scientific discovery: one must assume that “the vast multitude of phenomena he encounters may be accounted for in terms of the interactions of a fairly small number of basic entities, standard elementary individuals. His task thus becomes one of identifying the basic entities and describing the interactions in virtue of which the encountered phenomena are generated. From this emerge our…notions of the identity and nonidentity of phenomena.” (Hammarberg, p. 354) The linguistic notion of segment is perhaps the most important of these basic entities. It is an entity recognized both by those early lay-linguists, the Iron Age scribes who gave us the alphabet, as well as one of the most venerable notions in the history of modern linguistics. Yet, segments do not have a physical reality of their own; they do not exist in the physical world, but only in the human mind. They are “internally generated, the creature of some kind of perceptual-cognitive process.”

It is generally uncontroversial to speak of the output of the phonological component as the input to the phonetic component. From this it follows that phonology is cognitively and epistemically prior to phonetics. Coarticulation, for instance, results because of the process which maps segments—which, remember, exist only in the mind of speakers—onto articulatory and acoustic events. But one cannot talk about coarticulation without segments, since it is the spreading of articulatory-acoustic properties between segments that defines coarticulation. One must know that /s/ exists, and has an inherent properties not normally associated with—or compatible with—lip rounding to even observe the anticipatory lip rounding in words like soon.

The existence of coarticulation is often understood teleologically, in the sense that is taken to be in part mechanical, automatic, inertial. This too is a mistake, according to Hammarberg: apparent teleological explanations of human behavior should be recast, as is the tradition in Western philosophy, as the result of intentional, causal behavior. The existence of anticipatory articulation shows us that the influence of the /u/ in soon has on the realization of the preceding /s/ occurred some time before instructions to the articulators were generated, and the level at which this influence occurs should therefore be identified with the mental rather than the physiological. Hammarberg continues to argue that coarticulatory processes are akin to ordinary allophony and should reside in the scope of phonological theory. This argument is strengthened insofar as coarticulation has a language-specific character, as is sometimes claimed.

Appelbaum, while not citing Hammarberg’s original paper, extends this critique to the theory of speech perception. It is an assumption of the so-called motor theory that there are invariant properties which identify “phonetic gestures”. Since the motor theorists do not present any evidence that such invariants soc much as exist, we instead must be abstract out into mental entities which have all the properties of—and which Appelbaum identifies with—what we are calling segments, or perhaps lower-level entities like phonological features. Under this approach, then, there is no content to the motor theory of speech perception beyond the obvious point that phonetic experience, somehow, turns into purely mental representations. Again, the empiricist biases of phonetics have lead us astray.

The above discussion may influence the way we think about the role of phonetics in linguistics education. Phonetics is generally viewed as its own autonomous subdiscipline, and modern acoustic and articulatory analysis is certainly complex enough to justify serious graduate instruction, but it would seem to suggest that phonetic tools exist primarily as a way of gathering phonological information rather than as an autonomous discipline. I am not sure I am ready to conclude that, but it certainly is provocative!

Endnotes

Empiricism refers to a theory of epistemology and should not be confused with the empirical method in science (the use of sense-based observation). Many prominent thinkers reject empiricism in favor of rationalism, but support the use of empirical methods. No one is seriously arguing against the use of the senses.
This will be shown to be yet another example of physics envy as the source of sloppy thinking in linguistics.

References

Appelbaum, I. 1996. The lack of invariance problem and the goal of speech perception. In Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 1541-1544.
Hammarberg, R. 1976. The metaphysics of coarticulation. Journal of Phonetics 4: 353-363.

Noam on phonotactics

(Emphasis mine.)

Take the question of sound structure. Here too the person who has acquired knowledge of a language has quite specific knowledge about the facts that transcend his or her experience, for example, about which nonexistent words are possible words and which are not. Consider the forms strid and bnid. Speakers of English have not heard either of these forms, but they know that strid is a possible word, perhaps the name of some exotic fruit they have not seen before, but bnid, though pronounceable, is not a possible word of the language. Speakers of Arabic, in contrast, know that bnid is a possible word and strid is not; speakers of Spanish known that neither strid nor bnid is a possible word of their language. The facts can be explained in terms of rules of sound structure that the language learner comes to know in the course of acquiring the language.

Acquisition of the rules of sound structure, in turn, depends on fixed principles governing possible sound systems for human languages, the elemnts of which they are constituted, the manner of their combination and the modifications that they may undergo in various contexts. These principles are common to English, Arabic, Spanish, and all other human languages and are used unconsciously by a person acquiring any of these languages…

Suppose one were to argue that the knowledge of possible words is derived “by analogy.” The explanation is empty until an account is given of this notion. If we attempt to develop a concept of “analogy” that will account for these facts, we will discover that we are building into this notion the rules and principles of sound structure. (Chomsky 1988:26)

References

Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures. MIT Press.

Defectivity in Tagalog

[This is part of a small but growing series of defectivity case studies. Here I am well out of my linguistic comfort zone, working with a language I know very little about, so please take my comments cum salo granis.]

The behavior of the Tagalog actor focus (AF) infix (and occasionally, prefix) -um- has received an enormous amount of attention since the days of prosodic morphology. Schachter & Otanes (1972; henceforth SO), cited in Orgun & Sprouse (1999), claim that “-um- does not occur with bases beginning with /m/ or /w/” (p. 292). Presumably this statement means such bases are defective with respect to their actor focus form; that is certainly how Orgun & Sprouse—and most of the subsequent literature—has interpreted this. I am aware of one complication, however. First off, many verbs instead use the prefix mag– to mark actor focus; SO could simply be making a distributional statement about two allomorphs of the actor focus marker. As I understand it, whether a verb takes -um-, mag-, or both is conditioned by verb semantics, whether or not the verb is derived or a bare root, whether or not the verb is borrowed or not, and so on, and there is probably some regional, register, and individual variation too.¹ And there are other focus markers beyond -um- and mag-.

Orgun & Sprouse (henceforth OS) provide just a few examples (p. 206). According to them, there is no AF form *mumahal ‘to become expensive’ (< mahal). It’s not really clear what we ought to reason from *mumahal. First, do all adjectives have a corresponding AF verb form? Secondly, one might ask whether magmahal is the AF form of this adjective. According to Wiktionary, it is, so this is probably just an instance of ordinary morphological blocking. Third, this is obviously a loanword, which might have something to do with its choice of AF affix and/or whether it participates in the AF system at all. Similarly, OS give the example *mumura ‘to become cheap’ (< mura), but Wiktionary says magmura exists and has the relevant reading. If this is correct, OS may have confused defectivity and blocking.

OS provide two other types of examples of what they call defectivity.

First, OS claim that /Cw…/-initial stems borrowed from English can form AF forms of the form /C-um-w…/ but not /Cw-um…/. Thus the AF infinitive sumwer (< Eng. swear) well-formed, but *swumer is not. It is not clear this generalization is correct, since Ross (1996) elicits the AF infinitive [twumɪtɘɾ] (< Eng. twitter; p. 15) from “a native speaker of Tagalog in her thirties who had recently come to Canada from Manila…” who was “asked to ‘borrow’ hypothetical English loanwords…” (p. 2).² OS do not discuss /Cm-…/-initial borrowings, and they give us no reason to suspect that /Cw…/- and /Cm…/-initial loanword stems would behave differently, but Ross also elicits [smumajl] (< Eng. smile; p. 15).

Secondly, OS claim that /m, w/-initial stems borrowed from English do not form AF verbs in -um-. I have not been able to find any of their examples in a Tagalog dictionary, so these may just be poorly assimilated loanwords.

OS note that there is no general restriction on homomorphemic /…mum…/ sequences in Tagalog, and they note that reduplication may also produce /…mum…/. Even if their description is correct, it is a mystery why this restriction holds only of a specific AF affix. But I suspect that OS have either misunderstood SO, or perhaps misgeneralized from SO’s admittedly vague comment.

Before I should conclude, I should note that the empirical situation for Tagalog linguistics is dire. The language has many tens of millions of speakers, and has long been of interest to linguists. There are extensive grammatical resources on Tagalog in English and Spanish. Yet any time I interact with Tagalog examples in the literature, I find data inconsistencies, analytical laziness, or both. As a student put it to me: “As a Filipina it feels disrespectful and offensive, and as a linguist it feels super shady and raises so many philosophy of science red flags.” There may be some relevant results in Zuraw 2007, which elicits a corpus of the AF forms of Tagalog loanwords, including forms in /Sm-…/, but I am unable to reconcile those findings with Ross 1996, despite the fact that Ross and Zuraw are the same person.

Endnotes

For roots that take both affixes, the two AF forms may or may not be synonymous. For example, pumunta and magpunta are roughly equivalent AF forms of ‘to go’. However, bumuli means ‘to buy’ whereas magbili means ‘to sell’.
Note that it was the ’90s, mannnnnn, so this is about songbirds; it has nothing to do with microblogging.

References

Orgun, C. O. and Sprouse, R. L. 1999. From MPARSE to CONTROL: deriving ungrammaticality. Phonology 16:191-224.
Ross, K. 1996. Floating phonotactics: variability in reduplication and infixation in Tagalog loanwords. Master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.
Schachter, P. and Otanes, F. 1972. Tagalog Reference Grammar. University of California Press.
Zuraw, K. 2007. The role of phonetic knowledge in phonological patterning: corpus and survey evidence from Tagalog infixation. Language 83: 277-316.

Magic and productivity: Spanish metaphony

In Gorman & Yang 2019 (henceforth GY), we provide an analysis of metaphonic patterns in Spanish. This is just one of four or five case studies and it is a bit too brief to go into some interesting representational issues. In this post I’ll try to fill some of the missing details as I understand them, with the caveat that Charles does not necessarily endorse any of my proposals here.

The tolerance principle approach to productivity is somewhat unique in that it is not tied to any particular theory of rules or representations, so long as such theories provide a way to encode competing rules applying in order of decreasing specificity (Pāṇini’s principle or the elsewhere principle). Yet any particular tolerance analysis requires us to commit to a specific formal analysis of the phenomenon⁠—the relevant rules and the representations over which they operate—so that we know what to count. The way in which I apply the tolerance principle also presumes that productivity (e.g., as witnessed by child overregularization errors) or its lack (as witnessed by inflectional gaps) is a first-class empirical observation and that any explanatorily-adequate tolerance analysis ought to account for it. What this means to me is that the facts productivity can adjudicate between different formal analyses, as the following example shows.

The facts are these. A large percentage of Spanish verbs, all of which have a surface mid vowel (e or o) in the infinitive, exhibit alternations targeting the nucleus of the final syllable of the stem. In all three conjugations, one can find verbs in which this surface mid vowel diphthongizes to ie [je] or ue [we], respectively.¹Furthermore, in the third conjugation, there is a class of verbs in which the e in the final syllable of certain forms alternates with an i.²

The issue, of course, is that there are verbs which are almost identical to the diphthongizing or e–i stems but which do not undergo these alternations (GY:178f.). One can of course deny that magic is operating here, but this does not seem workable.³ We need therefore to identify the type of magic: the rules and representations involved.

There is some reason to think that conjugation class is relevant to these verb stem alternations. For example, Mayol et al. (2007) analyzes verb stem errors in a sample of six children acquiring Spanish, a corpus of roughly 2,000 verb tokens. Nearly all errors in this corpus involve underapplication of diphthongization to diphthongizing verbs in the first and second conjugation; errors in the third conjugation are extremely rare. Secondly the e-i alternations are limited to the third conjugation. As Harris (1969:111) points out, the e form surfaces only when the stem is followed by an i in the first syllable of the desinence. This suggests that the alternation is a lowering rather than a raising one, and explains why this pattern is confined to the third (-i-) conjugation. Finally, there are about a dozen Spanish verbs, all of the third conjugation, which are defective in exactly those inflectional forms—those in which there is either stress on the stem or those in which the stem is followed by a desinential /i/ in the following syllable—which would reveal to us whether the stem is diphthongization or lowering. These three facts seem to be telling us that these alternations are sensitive to conjugation class.

Jim Harris has long argued for an abstract phoneme analysis of Spanish diphthongization. In Harris 1969, diphthongization reflect abstract phonemes, present underlyingly, denoted /E, O/; no featural decomposition is provided, but one could imagine that they are underspecified for some features related to height. Harris (1985) instead supposes that the vowels which undergo diphthongization under stress bear two skeletal “x” slots, one linked and one unlinked, as follows.

o
|
X X

This distinguishes them from ordinary non-alternating mid vowels (which only have one “x”) and non-alternating diphthongs (which are prelinked to two “x”s). Harris argues this also provides explanation for why stress conditions this alternation.

One interesting property of Harris’ account, one which I do not believe has been remarked on before, it is that it seems to rule out the idea that diphthongization vs. non-diphthongization is “governed by the grammar”: it is purely a fact of lexical representation and surface forms follow directly from applying the rules to the abstract phonemic forms. To put it more fancifully, there is no “daemon” inside the phonemic storage unit of the lexicon deciding where the diphthongs or lowering vowels go; such facts are of interest for “evolutionary” theorizing, but are accidents of diachrony.

However, I believe the facts of productivity and the conditioning effects of conjugation support an alternative—and arguably more traditional—analysis, in which diphthongization and lowering are governed by abstract diacritics at the root level, in the form of rule features of the sort proposed by Kisseberth (1970) and Lakoff (1970).

I propose that verbs with mid vowel in the final syllable of their stem which do not undergo diphthongization, like pegar ‘to stick to’; (e.g., pego ‘I stick to’), are marked [−diph], and those which do undergo diphthongization, like negar ‘to deny’ (niego ‘I deny’) are marked [+diph]; both are assumed to have an /e/ in underlying form. Similarly, I propose that verbs which undergo lowering, like pedir ‘to ask for’ (e.g., pido ‘I ask for’), are specified [+lowering] and non-lowering verbs, like vivir ‘to live’ (vivo ‘I live), are specified [−lowering]; both have an underlyingly /i/. Then, the rule of lowering is

Lowering: i -> e / __ C_0 i

or, in prose, an /i/ lowers to /e/ when followed by zero or more consonants and a /i/. I assume a convention of rule application such that rule R can apply only to those /i/s which are part of a root marked [+R]; it is as if there is an implicit [+R] specification on the rule’s target. Therefore, the rule of lowering does not apply to vivir. This rule feature convention is assumed to apply to all phonological rules, including diphthongization.

I furthermore propose that [diph] and [lowering] rule features are inserted during the derivation according to GY’s tolerance analysis. For first (-a-) and second (-e-) conjugation verbs, [−diph] is the default and [+diph] is lexically conditioned.

[] -> [+diph] / __ {√neg-, ...}
   -> [-diph] / __

For third (-i-) conjugation verbs, I assume that there is no default specification for either rule feature.

[] -> [+lowering] / __ {√ped-, ...}
[] -> [-lowering] / __ {√viv-, ...}

I have not yet provided formal machinery to limit these generalizations to the particular conjugations, but I wish to stay agnostic about morphological theory and so I assume that any adequate model of the morphophonological interface ought to be able to encode conjugation class-specific generalizations like the above.

I leave open the question as to how roots which fail to satisfy the phonological conditions for lowering (like those which do not contain a final-syllable /i/) or diphthongization (like those which do not contain a final-syllable mid vowel) are specified with respect to the [diph] and [lowering] features. I am inclined to say that they remain underspecified for these features throughout the derivation. However, all that is essential here is that such roots are not in scope for the tolerance computation.

Let us suppose that we wish to encode, synchronically, phonological “trends” in the lexicon with respect to the distribution of diphthongizing and/or lowering verbs, such as Bybee & Pardo’s claim that e–ie diphthongization is facilitated when followed by the trill rr. Such observations could be encoded at the point in which rule features are inserted, if desired. It is unclear how a similar effect might be achieved under the abstract phoneme analysis. I remain agnostic on this question, which may ultimately bear on the past tense debate.

In future work (if blogging can be called “work”), it would be interesting to expand the proposal to other cases of morpholexical behavior studied by Kisseberth (1970), Lakoff (1970), and Zonneveld (1978), among others. Yet my proposal does not entail that we draw similar conclusions for all superficially similar case studies. For instance, I am unaware at present of evidence contradicting Rubach’s (2016) arguments that the Polish yers are abstract phonemes.

Endnotes

Let us assume, as does Harris, that the appearance of the [e] in both diphthongs is the result of a default insertion rule applying after diphthongization converts the nucleus to the corresponding glide.
This of course does not exhaust the set of verbal alternations, as there are highly-irregular consonantal and vocalic alternations in a handful of other verbs.
Albright et al. (2001) and Bybee & Pardo (1981) are sometimes understood to have found solid evidence for a “non-magical” analysis, in which the local context in which a stem mid vowel is found is the sole determinant. This is a massive overinterpretation. Bybee & Pardo identify some local contexts which seem to favor diphthongization, and the results of a small nonce word cloze task are consistent with these findings. Albright et al. use a simple computational model to discover some contexts which seem to favor diphthongization, and find that subjects’ ratings of possible nonce words (on a seven-point Likert scale) are correlated with the models’ predictions for diphthongization. Schütze (2005) gives a withering critique of the general nonce word rating approach. Even ignoring this, neither study links nonce word tasks in adult knowledge of, or child acquisition of, actual Spanish words.

References

Albright, A., Andrade, A., and Hayes, B. 2001. Segmental environments of Spanish diphthongization. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 7: 117-151.
Baković, E., Heinz, J., and Rawski, J. In press. Phonological abstractness in the mental lexicon. In The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon, to appear.
Bale, A., and Reiss, C. 2018. Phonology: a Formal Introduction. MIT Press.
Bybee, J., and Pardo, E. 1981. Morphological and lexical conditioning of rules: experimental evidence from Spanish. Linguistics 19: 937-968.
Gorman, K. and Yang, C. 2019. When nobody wins. In F. Rainer, F. Gardani, H. C. Luschützky and W. U. Dressler (ed.), Competition in Inflection and Word Formation, 169-193. Springer.
Harris, J. 1969. Spanish Phonology. MIT Press.
Harris, J. 1985. Spanish diphthongisation and stress: a paradox resolved. Phonology Yearbook 2:31-45.
Lakoff, G. 1970. Irregularity in Syntax. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Kisseberth, C. W. 1970. The treatment of exceptions. Papers in Linguistics 2:44-58.
Mayol, Laia. 2007. Acquisition of irregular patterns in Spanish verbal morphology. In Proceedings of the Twelfth ESSLLI Student Session, 1-11.
Schütze, C. 2005. Thinking about what we are asking speakers to do. In S. Kepser and M. Reis (ed.), Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives, pages 457-485. Mouton de Gruyter.
Zonneveld, W. 1978. A Formal Theory of Exceptions in Generative Phonology. Peter de Ridder.

On the different types of magic

In two earlier posts, I discussed the idea of magic, my term for the deductive necessity that some linguistic property distinguishes those morphemes which undergo or do not undergo surface-unpredictable alternations. For instance, the Spanish verb negar ‘to deny’ diphthongizes under stress (e.g., niego ‘I deny’), whereas the superficially similar pegar ‘to stick to s.t.’ does not (pego ‘I stick to s.t.’), and there must be something different about the two stems that causes this.

In a forthcoming handbook chapter, Baković, E., Heinz, J., and Rawski (in press; henceforth BHR) take up the familiar Kiparskian question of the locuses of phonological abstractness, and in doing so, they discuss several ways in which this magic might be encoded. I would like to briefly review their taxonomy.

Under the suppletive analysis, magic verbs like negar have two stems underlying, perhaps /neg-/ and /njɛg-/, the latter used when primary stress falls on the stem. Linguists have—rightly, I think—been uncomfortable with this kind of analysis when the supposedly suppletive stem allomorphs are phonologically similar, and when the distribution of the allomorphs are easily stated in phonological or morphosyntactic terms; both are the case here. However, Aronoff (1994) argues that one must recognize the existence of suppletive patterns and his major case studies (from Hebrew and Latin) involve less-similar stem allomorphs whose distributions are not so easily stated. I am not immediately convinced by Aronoff’s arguments, but I think they should be taken seriously. BHR are similarly skeptical of the use of suppletion except in cases where the allomorphs share little material (e.g., the Korean nominative, which is realized as /-ka/ or /-i/ depending on context).²

Under the abstract diacritic analysis, magical stems bear an feature which is part of the environment for some rule. One concrete version of this is to make the diacritic literally a rule feature, such that rule R cannot apply to a stem unless that stem bears the feature [+R]. For instance, we might represent the stems of the two Spanish verbs as /neg- {+diph}/ and /peg- {−diph}/.¹ We of course need then to write the diphthongization structural change (but this is not hard) and to specify its environment (but this no more or less hard than it would be under the suppletive analysis).

Finally, under the abstract phoneme analysis, magical stems contain phonemes³ which are “abstract” (in a sense to be specified shortly) and trigger the relevant rule (here, diphthongization). BHR discern two types of abstract phonemes: absolutely abstract phonemes are feature bundles which do not appear on the surface, and restrictedly abstract phonemes consist of surface-licit feature bundles which surface in the some, but not all, of the contexts in which they are posited.⁴

The distinction between abstract diacritics and abstract phonemes seems important. It is probably not surprising that self-described morphologists seem to prefer abstract diacritics whereas phonologists prefer abstract phonemes.

Endnotes

One can further imagine that {−diph} is not present underlyingly but is filled in by a lexical redundancy rule early in the derivation, at least for 1st (-a-) and 2nd (-e-) conjugation verbs for which non-diphthongization seems to be the default (see Gorman & Yang 2019 and citations therein). Similar redundancy rules will be called for all rules of “pure phonology”, those which do not show morpholexical conditioning.
This type of analysis is closely related to Gouskova and Pater’s concept of “exceptional morphs” in Optimality Theory.
I note it is not exactly the phoneme itself which is abstract, but rather the overall phonemic form of the morph. For instance, according to Lieber (1987:100f.), German umlaut (a fronting of a [+back] stem vowel) is triggered by a “floating” [−back] feature which is underlyingly present in just those stems which undergo umlaut.
It is not clear to me whether BHR treat this distinction as an object of grammar, or whether it’s just a descriptive notion.

References

Aronoff, M. 1994. Morphology by Itself. MIT Press.
Baković, E., Heinz, J., and Rawski, J. In press. Phonological abstractness in the mental lexicon. In The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon, to appear.
Gorman, K. and Yang, C. 2019. When nobody wins. In Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Hans Christian Luschützky and Wolfgang U. Dressler (ed.), Competition in inflection and word formation, pages 169-193. Springer.
Harris, J. 1969. Spanish Phonology. MIT Press.
Harris, J. 1985. Spanish diphthongisation and stress: a paradox resolved. Phonology Yearbook 2:31-45.
Lieber, R. 1987. An Integrated Theory of Autosegmental Processes. State University of New York Press.

O in truncated compounds

English uses stump compounds formed by taking (roughly) the first syllable of two (or three) words and adjoining them. This is the presumably the process behind real-estate neologisms like Soho (< South of Houston) and Noho (< North of Houston), truncated brand names like HoJo (< Howard Johnson, a hotel chain), and nicknames for celebrities like BoJo (< Beau Johnson) and FloJo (< Florence Griffith Joyner). One strange property of these compounds—documented in an unpublished paper I presented with Laurel MacKenzie at an LSA meeting many years ago—is that when such compounds contain an orthographic <o>, it is almost always pronounced with the GOAT vowel (e.g., American English [oʊ]) even when that is unfaithful to the underlying pronunciation. Thus Soho is [ˈsoʊ.hoʊ], not the more faithful [ˈsaʊ.haʊ]. And, the second syllable of Samohi, a stump compound for Santa Monica High School, is presumably read […moʊ…] even though it stands in for [ˈmɑ.nɪ.kə].

(h/t: Laurel, of course.)

banner reading "Samohi"

Defectivity in Norwegian

[This is part of a small but growing series of defectivity case studies.]

Icelandic is not the only Scandinavian language to exhibit defectivity in imperatives: Rice (2003, 2004; henceforth R) describes a superficially similar pattern of defectivity in Norwegian adjectives.

In Norwegian, the infinitival form of most verbs consists of the particle å, the verb stem, and a schwa (which, like in German, is spelled -e). Such verbs’ imperatives then consists of the bare stem, without a particle or the schwa; e.g., å skrive ‘to write’/skriv ‘write!’. A second, smaller class of verbs are monosyllables ending in a (non-schwa) vowel. These verbs use the bare verb stem in both infinitive and imperative; e.g., å tre ‘to step’/tre ‘step!’. While R does not go into any details about how these two patterns might be encoded, one might posit two allomorphs of the infinitive suffix, -e and zero. Presumably this allomorphy is in part lexically conditioned, since it seems necessary to distinguish between minimal pairs like å vie ‘to dedicate’/vi ‘dedicate!’, which belongs to the former class, and å si ‘to say’/si ‘say!’, which belongs to the latter. However, R only gives a few examples of vowel-final monosyllable with infinitive in -e (all other verbs of this shape have zero infinitives), so it’s possible these are just exceptions and the allomorphy conditioning is mostly phonological.

A third class of verbs are those whose stem ends in a rising-sonority consonant cluster; e.g., åpne ‘to open’, sykle ‘to bike’.¹These superficially resemble the first class of verbs (e.g., å skrive) in that they end in a schwa in the infinitive. However, Norwegian does not permit rising sonority codas, so the expected *åpn, *sykl, and so on are ill-formed.

According to R, some speakers simply use circumlocutions to avoid the imperative of such verbs, making this a standard case of defectivity. However, R mentions several other strategies used by Norwegian speakers:²

The word-final sonorant can be made syllabic (e.g., [oːpn̩]).
If the cluster consists of a voiceless consonant followed by a sonorant, the sonorant can be devoiced, reducing the sonority rise (e.g., [oːpn̥]).
One can insert a schwa to break up the cluster (e.g., [oːp.pɘn]).
One can insert a schwa after the cluster (e.g., [oːp.nɘ]).

One question that arises is whether there are any other places in the Norwegian grammar where we would expect word-final rising sonority consonant clusters to surface. As others have noted (e.g., Albright 2009), most if not all instances of inflectional defectivity are limited to specific morphological categories. For speakers who cannot generate an imperative of verbs like åpne or sykle, is this defectivity limited to this the category of imperatives, or is it found anywhere else in the language?

Endnotes

R gives the infinitives of this third class of verbs without the å particle. It is unclear to me whether this is intentional or just an oversight.
These forms are ones I have posited on the basis of R’s description, which is not as detailed as one might like.

References

Albright, A. 2009. Lexical and morphological conditioning of paradigm gaps. In C. Rice and S. Blaho (ed.), When Nothing Wins: Modeling Ungrammaticality in OT, pages 117-164. Equinox.
Rice, C. 2003. Dialectal variation in Norwegian imperatives. Nordlyd 31: 372-384.
Rice, C. 2005. Optimal gaps in optimal paradigms. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 4: 155-170.