TOWARDS A THEORY OF PHONOLOGICAL ALPHABETS by ANDREA CALABRESE Laurea in

477 Pages·2008·30.75 MB·English

TOWARDS A THEORY OF PHONOLOGICAL ALPHABETS
by
ANDREA CALABRESE
Laurea in Lettere e Filosofia, UniversitA di Padova
(1980)
Submitted to the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
at the
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
May, 1988
c Andrea Calabrese, 1988
The author hereby grants to M.I.T. permission to reproduce and to
distribute copies of this thesis document in whole or in part.
Signature of Author
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
May, 1988
Certified by
Thesis Supervisor
Accepted by
,/¼ jrv r
Chair man, Departmental Committee
ARI,.C
RC( C
TOWARDS A THEORY OF PHONOLOGICAL ALPHABETS
by
Andrea Calabrese
Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
on May 20, 1988 in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
Linguistics
Abstract
One of the basic tenets of phonology is that every language has an
inventory of phonological segments used to distinguish lexical items in
underlying representations. I call the inventory of phonological
segments of a given language the phonological alphabet of that
language. Each phonological alphabet is always organized according to a
precise pattern and has a well-defined structure. In this thesis, I argue
that negative conditions on feature cooccurrence are the correct means
to represent the structure of a phonological alphabet. I call these
negative conditions on feature cooccurrence filters. An example of
filter is the following: (i) *[+low, -back]. (i) represents the fact that the
feature values [+low] and [-back) cannot occur together in the same
feature bundle. I hypothesize that when a filter holds in a given
language, the phonological segment which is characterized by the
configuration of features disallowed by the filter is absent from the
phonological alphabet of that language. Thus, I represent the fact that
the low front vowel /ae/ is absent from the phonological alphabet of
Italian by hypothesizing that the filter *([+low, -back] holds in Italian.
I propose that there is a set of filters provided by Universal
Grammar, which I call UG filters. I propose that UG filters are
hierarchikally ordered: the more complex a phonological segment is, the
higher the filter that excludes it is in the hierarchy. The hierarchy of UG
filters is also intended to account for Jakobson's (1941) observations on
language learning and loss, as well his observations on the universal
implications about the structure of phonological alphabets.
In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that hierarchically ordered UG filters
are needed to represent generalizations about phonological alphabets.
In this chapter, I also argue that Universal Grammar provides a set of
rules that have the function of repairing configurations of features
which violate filters. I call these rules clean uD rules. By hypothesizing
an interaction among phonological rules, filters and clean up rules, I
account for sevvral phonological phenomena in a straightforward way.
Finally, I attempt to account for situations in which filters can block the
application of rules and how configurations of features disallowed by
filters may surface without being repaired by clean up rules. In doing
this, I also present some arguments against the Structure Preservation
Principle proposed by Kiparsky (1984, 1985).
In Chapter 2, I discuss the Theory of Underspecification. The
central idea of the Theory of Underspecification is that not all of the
feature values characterizing a segment are phonologically relevant,
and that the phonologically irrelevant feature values are underlyingly
unspecified. In this chapter, I argue that the feature values which are
phonologically relevant in the segments of a given phonological
alphabet are determined by the stucture of that phonological alphabet,
and specifically by the UG filters which are underlyingly violated in
that phonological alphabet. In this chapter, I also discuss the Theory of
Underspecification proposed by Archangeli (1984) and Archangeli and
Pulleyblank (1986) and the Theory of Underspecification proposed by
Steriade (1987).
In Chapter 3, I argue that linguage-specific filters are needed in
addition to the UG filters in order to account for the structure of
phonological alphabets. These language specific filters can be acquired
only through negative evidence and have a very marginal phonological
status. I will show that they do not play a role in the Theory of
Under specification.
In Chapter 4, I discuss the different clean up rules which I
propose. In this chapter, some modification of the formalism adopted to
represent them will be proposed.
Thesis Supervisor: Morris Halle
Title: Institute Professor-Professor of Linguistics
Acknowledgements
In every act of thanks, there is the history of a soul which
realized its desires. In the following acknowledgements, there is the
history of my soul during the last five years.
At the beginning of my first paper in Phonology, two years ago, I
quoted the following passage from Plato's Phaedrus:
"Socrates [...) What ground, you may ask, have I
for saying so? Good sir, there is something
welling up within my breast, which makes me
feel that I could find something different, and
something better, to say. I am of course well
aware it can't be originating in my own mind, for
I kn(w my own ignorance: so I suppose it can
only be that it has been poured into me, through
my ears, as into a vessel, from some external
source, though in my stupid fashion I have
actually forgotten how, and from whom, I heard
it."
(Plato, Phaedrus 235c)
If in that confused time I was not able to remember who was
pouring knowledge into my ears, now that I begin to distinguish light
from shadows, I clearly know to whom I owe my knowledge and to
whom I owe my gratitude. If this thesis exists, it is because Morris
Halle, Donca Steriade and Jim Harris, like ancient masters, have taught a
little of their art to me, the apprentice, in that "bottega d'arte" that is
the Department of Linguistics at MIT.
Morris Halle's maieutic formed me not only as a linguist, but also
as a person. Morris, my Socrates, will remain an unforgettable example
of great scientific and moral teaching for me for the rest of my life.
When I first met Donca Steriade, I knew nothing about Phonology.
Donca was my first teacher of Phonology. From her, I not only learned
Phonology, i learned an entirely new way of thinking in Phonology.
Only thanks to her continously challenging me to give arguments was I
able to overcome my lack of mental discipline enough to write this
thesis with a minimum of coherence and theoretical interest.
The matchless ability of Jim Harris in dissecting an argument and
in individuating the weak points of a theory has been fundamental in
my growing as a phonologist and linguist.
There is a fundamental truth that I learned in these last years at
MIT that I need to disclose here because I believe it is the most
important thing that I have learned at MIT. For years, I thought that I
knew too little and had to learn more and more to overcome that. At
MIT, I have finally realized that I will always know very little because
of the limits of my mind and my memory and because of the unending
nature of knowledge. This discovery would have only anguished me
just a few years ago. But now I can face it with serenity, because I
have also discovered something else of fundamental importance. What
matters--and this is what I finally realized--is not learning,
accumulating knowledge or facts, but the desire to understand, to
imagine solutions, ideas, to capture the facts in order to guess their
secret. What matters is in the depth of the researcher's soul, in that
divine spark that urges human beings to search for an answer: "Fatti
non foste per vivere come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza"
Ulisses says in Dante's Inferna I learned with fatigue and pain that the
most important virtue is humility: history changes, theories die and
come to life, like human beings in this world of vanity. We cannot
assume to have arrived at a perfect, still point. In every idea, in every
fact there can be the gold of knowledge.
There are a lot of people to whom I feel gratitude for what they
gave me in these last years. This is the right place to thank them.
I want to thank Ken Hale. Ken represents a lot for me. There was
a moment during my stay at MIT when I decided to abandon
Linguistics which, at that time, was only Syntax for me. In speaking
with Ken about the topics that were of interest to me at that time, I
understood that studying Linguistics still had a meaning for me.
I thank Luigi Rizzi and Adriana Belletti for their help and support
during these last years, in Pisa and Cambridge. I especially thank Luigi.
Without his help this thesis would not exist. I will be grateful to him
forever.
I thank my friends from Padova: Paola BenincA, Guglielmo Cinque,
Lorenzo Renzi and Laura Vanelli. If I have achieved anything in
linguistics, it is because of their teaching, encouragement and
friendship.
I thank Ewa Higgins who has been my friend in my most difficult
moments. I could not have survived MIT without Ewa's support
I thank all of the members of MIT linguistic community, but in
particular I thank Jay Keyser for his encouragement and his simpstia
during ali these years, Luigi Burzio for his encouragement, support and
help, and Maggie Browning, Maggie Carracino, Hyon Sook Choe, Jennifer
Cole, Alicja Gorecka, Isabelle Haik, Sabine latridou, Kyle Johnson, Betsy
Klipple, Dinette Massam, Kate Mc Creight Young, Janis Melvold, Nancy
Peters, Tova Rapoport, Betsy Ritter, Marc Ryser, Doug Saddy, Danilo
Salamanca, Michelle Sigler, Carol Tenny, Loren Trigo, and Corey
Washington. Thanks to them my experience at f'IT has been less
difficult. I want to apologize for my shyness, which has been a thorn in
my side.
I thank my family: my father, my mother, my grand-parents.
This thesis originates in that desire for life, that love for knowledge and
freedom that they gave me.
And last, but not least my gratitude and love to Lori, my wife. I
cannot enumerate the reasons that I have for being grateful to her,
because they are too many. I can only say that this thesis is also a fruit
of her love. Grazie di cuore, Lori.
TABLE OP CONTENTS
ABSTRACT 2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 4
Chapter 1 A THEORY OF UG FILTERS 9
1.0 Introduction 9
1.1 UG filters 20
1.2 Vowel Harmony in Finnish and Akan 27
1.3 Pronunciation of foreign segments 43
1.4 Metaphony in southern Italian dialects 56
1.5 Disallowed configurations of features 75
and the specifications of feature values
1.5.1 Brief excursus 77
1.6 The application of phonological rules and filters 78
1.7 Vowel Harmony in Ogori 83
1.8 Vowel Harmony in Paleo-Siberian languages 106
1.8.1 Koryak and Nez Perce 135
1.9 Surfacing of disallowed configurations of features 147
1.10 Okpe and Kwa languages 172
1.11 Romance languages 185
1.12 Against Structure Preservation 195
1.13 Two-vowel systems: the case of Kabardian 210
FOOTNOTES 234
Chapter 2 UNDERSPECIFICATION 246
2.1 A critique of Archangeli and Pulleyblank's 246
Theory of Underspecification
2.2 Steriade's Theory of Underspecification 257
2.3 A Theory of Underspecification based upon
UG filters 291
2.4 Underlyingly Absent distinctive values 324
2.5 Post-nasal voicing in Japanese 337
FOOTNOTES
343
7
Chapter 3 UG FILTERS AND AUXILIARY FILTERS 347
3.1 A tentative list of UG filters 348
3.2 Comments on the UG filters proposed in Sect. I. 357
3.3 Auxiliary filters. 373
3.4 Auxiliary filters and the Theory of
Underspecification 387
3.4.1 Appendix to Sect.4 404
3.5 Chain Shifts 412
FOOTNOTES 422
Chapter 4 CLEAN UP RULES 436
4.1 Fission 436
4.2 Delinking 457
4.3 Negation 460
BIBLIOGRAPHY 466
CHAPTER 1
AT HEQRY O UG FILTERS
0.INTRODUCTION.
Every linguist agrees that every language has an inventory of
phonological segments used to distinguish lexical items in underlying
representations. I will call the inventory of phonological segments of a
language the phonological alphabet of that language. Each segment of
the phonological alphabet of a given language is selected from the
entire range of possible phonological segments, and the selection of the
segments may vary according to the language. Thus, French has the
front rounded vowels /i/ and /6/ in its phonological alphabet, whereas
Italian does nct.
Linguists agree that these phonological alphabets are organized
along certain fundamental parameters. For example, vowel inventories
are organized along the parameters of hdight and backness intersected
by rounding, length, nasalization, etc. But vowel inventories are not
constructed by simply randomly choosing items along these
parameters: some vowel inventories are apparently impossible, others
common, and yet others rare. All seem to be built according to certain
basic criteria.
Every linguist also agrees that any adequate grammar must have
a formal means to describe the structure and the properties of
phonological alphabets.
In Generative Phonology, various proposal have been made in
this regard (cf. Halle (1962), Stanley (1967), Chomsky and Halle (1968),
Stampe (1972), Kiparsky (1981), (1985) among many others). There is,
however, no established agreement regarding the formal means that
should be used. In this thesis, I will take my stand on this issue and I
will propose a formal means to represent the structure and the
properties of phonological alphabets. I will argue that this formal
means consists of negative conditions on the cooccurrence of features,
similar to those originally proposed by Stanley (1967) and adopted by
Kiparsky (1981), (1985). A negative condition on feature cooccurrence
(which I will call a filter) has the following form where aFl,.., bF2
represent feature values:
(1) *[ aFl,..., bF21 ( a,b- +/-)
(1) represents the fact that the feature values aFI and bF2 , ..., cannot
cooccur in the same feature bundle. Therefore, if a filter like (1) holds
in a phonological system, a feature bundle that contains the
configuration of feature values aFl, bF2, ..., is disallowed in this system.
Thus, the segment or the class of segments which is peculiarly defined
by the presence of the feature values aFI, bF2,....., in its feature bundle
is missing in this system since its feature bundle is disallowed. I also
assume that if a segment or class of segments is missing in a segmental
system, this means that a filter like (1), which disallows the
configuration of feature values peculiar to this segment or class of
segments, holds in this system. Therefore, I assume that there is a
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