Phonetics and phonology

The ‘voice quality symbols’ (VoQS) transcription system for voice quality was introduced some 20 years ago, and no major revision has been undertaken since then. In this account we describe the first major revision of the VoQS chart, these changes being mostly in the form of additions to the section on phonation types, but include also changes to the layout of the supralaryngeal settings section. These reflect recent developments in the understanding of the physiological underpinnings of sounds produced in the larynx including certain phonation types.

Zwara Berber is a variety of Nafusi (ISO 639-3; Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016) which belongs to the eastern Zenati group within northern Berber (where Berber is the scientific term for Tamazight), a branch of Afro-Asiatic. Zwara (Zuwārah, Zuwara, Zuāra, Zuara, Zouara) is a coastal city located at 32.9° N, 12.1° E in Libya. The speakers refer to themselves as /at ˈwil.lul/ (also /ajt ˈwil.lul/) ‘those of Willul’ and to their specific variety of the language as /t.ˈwil.lult/ ‘the language of Willul’. Having no official status during the Italian colonization of Libya and the first period after the country's independence in 1951, repression of the language became severe after the Cultural Revolution of 1973. Its propagation through teaching and the media fell under a constitutional ban on the denial of the Arab identity of the state, and qualified as such as treason, a capital offense. Until the revolution of 2011 (‘17 February’), the language was therefore not spoken in cultural, educational or governmental domains and could not be taught, printed or broadcast. The number of Tamazight speakers in Libya is estimated at 184,000 in Lewis et al. (2016) and at 560,000 by Chakel & Ferkal (2012). In the absence of a municipal register, the number of inhabitants in Zwara is uncertain. A conservative estimate is between 50,000 and 100,000, which is also the number of speakers of the Zwara variety. Other than through exposure by radio and television, children learn Arabic only from age six, when attending school. Speakers have variable L2 Arabic competence depending on exposure to the language.

This paper describes changes to the extIPA (Extensions to the IPA) symbol set, the motivation for these changes, and areas where future changes by the IPA might be helpful to clinical transcribers. The extIPA symbol set was introduced some twenty-five years ago. Since that time, some minor changes have been introduced to the extIPA chart but no major rearrangement has been attempted. The 2010 Oslo meeting of ICPLA (International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association) started a revision of the extIPA chart, and this process was recently completed. A revised extIPA chart was approved at the 2016 ICPLA meeting. The revision involved the addition, modification and removal of categories and symbols. All changes derive from the need to denote sounds encountered in disordered speech that were not covered by the original chart.

A method is demonstrated for creating density-equalizing maps of IPA consonant and vowel charts, where the size of a cell in the chart reflects information such as the crosslinguistic frequency of the consonant or vowel. Transforming the IPA charts in such a way allows the visualization of interactions between phonetic features. Density-equalizing maps are used to illustrate a range of facts about consonant and vowel inventories, including the frequency of consonants and vowels and the frequency of common diacritics, and to illustrate the frequency of deletion and epenthesis involving particular consonants and vowels. Solutions are proposed for issues involving genealogical sampling, counting pairs of very similar phones, and counting diacritics in relation to basic symbols.

This paper focuses on the Japhug language (local name /kɯrɯ skɤt/) of Kamnyu village (/kɤmɲɯ/, Chinese Ganmuniao 干木鸟) in Gdongbrgyad area (/ʁdɯrɟɤt/, Chinese Longerjia 龙尔甲), Mbarkhams county (Chinese Maerkang 马尔康), Rngaba prefecture, Sichuan province, China. Japhug belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, and is one of the four Rgyalrong languages, alongside Tshobdun, Zbu and Situ.

Summary

In this chapter I discuss the basic assumptions underlying the framework presented in this book and give a brief overview of the modular approach to grammar that provides the conceptual motivation for the theory.

The modular enterprise

At the heart of the substance-free approach is the thesis that phonology is an autonomous module; that it exists as a component of grammar and possesses domain-specific representational and computation systems that are, in principle, independent of the representational and computational systems operating in morphosyntax or phonetics. Arguably, in this view phonology must be substance-free almost by definition: in the classic modular approach (Fodor 1983), modules are defined by characteristics such as information encapsulation and domain specificity. If phonology is a module, then the alphabet of phonological symbols and the types of operations available for these symbols must be independent of considerations that properly belong to other domains, despite the fact that such considerations are often relevant to the shape of phonological systems.

The substance-free approach takes autonomy and modularity seriously, resting on the assumption that the phonological grammar operates independently of external factors, similarly to recent work by authors such as Reiss (2007); Scheer (2010); Bermúdez-Otero (2012). Specifically, phonology is defined as a module that effects categorical computation over proprietary phonological symbols. The focus in this book is on segmental phonology, so the majority of such symbols encountered here are phonological features.

With respect to the identification of features, I follow the main tenet of the Contrastivist Hypothesis as expressed in structuralist phonology (e.g. Trubetzkoy 1939; Martinet 1955; Hjelmslev 1975) and recently revived in the ‘Toronto school’ of contrastive specification (e.g. Dresher et al. 1994; Dresher 2003, 2009; Hall 2007; Mackenzie 2013). I operate with the assumption that the set of features available to a language's phonological grammar is coextensive with the set of features used to make distinctions among segments found in lexical (underlying) representations for that language's morphemes. In this formulation, the Contrastivist Hypothesis is arguably the default assumption for a minimalist conception of phonology: if a feature is necessary to express lexical contrast, its existence is justified ‘outside’ the phonological grammar, and therefore appealing to it in our analysis of phonological patterns does not require special pleading.

Summary

In this chapter I offer an analysis of some aspects of suprasegmental phonology in Bothoa Breton. I focus on three issues:

Summary

The Breton language belongs to the Brythonic subdivision of the Celtic group of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken in Brittany, a peninsula in the west of present-day France, where it was brought by settlers from Britain in the fifth century ad. Historically, it has been spoken in Lower Brittany (French Basse-Bretagne; Breton Breizh-Isel), i.e. in the western part of the historic Duchy of Brittany. Today, native speakers are mostly spread throughout rural Brittany, and the language is severely endangered.1

Dialectal divisions

Traditionally, Breton is divided into four major dialect groups, on the basis of the old diocesan borders. These are as follows:

What is the relationship between phonetics and phonology? Are phonological features innate and universal, and do they have fixed phonetic correlates? These questions have received renewed prominence in theoretical debates, and this book explores them from a modular, substance-free perspective.

This in-depth analysis of Breton serves not only to introduce important data from this endangered language into the theoretical landscape but also to demonstrate the viability of a modular phonological framework. The book introduces a minimalist system of phonological representations built up on a language-specific basis, and integrates it with a fully-fledged computational framework, showcasing the numerous empirical and conceptual advantages of a substance-free view of phonology.

Presenting the first comprehensive analysis of the sound patterns of a Breton variety treated in a substance-free phonological framework, this book will enhance the understanding of Celtic phonology and offers a valuable reference for postgraduate students, academics and researchers working in phonological theory and Celtic studies.

Summary

In this chapter I lay out the vowel and consonant inventories of Bothoa Breton and discuss the most important aspects of variation in their phonetic realisation. I also present the proposed featural specifications for these segments that will be used in the following analysis chapters.

Vowel inventory

The inventory of the Bothoa dialect includes long and short oral vowels, as well as several nasal vowels and oral diphthongs. The system of the oral monophthongs is fairly symmetric, with a two-way backness contrast, a symmetrical distinction in length, and two front rounded qualities; its main unusual feature is the apparent presence of three height classes in ‘mid’ vowels. In line with typological expectations, the nasal vowel system is smaller than the oral one, and there is only a very limited length contrast among the nasal vowels. The diphthongs also present a relatively unremarkable system: they are all falling diphthongs with high vowels as non-syllable elements. I consider the three subsystems in turn.

Oral monophthongs

The oral monophthongs are shown in Table 7.1; I refer to Humphreys (1995) for exhaustive (albeit impressionistic) descriptions of their phonetic realisation. Here I concentrate on two aspects of the system that deserve further comment: the mid vowel system and the status of the [ə]/ [o] distinction.

Mid vowels

In the mid vowel region, there is a three-way height contrast for both front unrounded and back rounded vowels. Humphreys (1995) uses the French-based convention of using accents to distinguish among the three heights; I silently retranscribe his symbols as shown in Table 7.2.

Minimal or near-minimal pairs for height contrasts among front vowels are shown in (15). (See section 7.3.2 for explanation of the notation for final obstruents.)

This three-way distinction is characteristic of many Breton varieties. Cf. also Falc'hun (1951), with a generative analysis in Anderson (1981), and Le Du (1978, 2012) and Le Gall (1903) for Tréguier.

Phonetics and phonology

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Michele Loporcaro (2015). Vowel length from Latin to Romance. (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historic Linguistics 10.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xvii + 306.

Revisions to the VoQS system for the transcription of voice quality

Zwara (Zuwārah) Berber

Revisions to the extIPA chart

DAVID ODDEN, Introducing phonology, 2nd edn.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 338. ISBN 978-1-107-62797-0

Visualizing phonetic segment frequencies with density-equalizing maps

ERIC J. HELLER , Why you hear what you hear: An experiential approach to sound, music, and psychoacoustics. Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. i–xxviii + 590. ISBN: 9780691148595

Japhug

Chapter 2 - Conceptual foundations of substance-free phonology

Summary

Chapter 8 - Suprasegmental phonology

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IPA volume 47 issue 1 Cover and Back matter

IPA volume 47 issue 1 Cover and Front matter

References

Contents

Chapter 5 - Complexity and markedness in substance-free phonology

Chapter 6 - The Breton language

Summary

Chapter 10 - The phonology of consonants: palatalisation and gliding

DANIEL RECASENS, Coarticulation and sound change in Romance (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory Series 329). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014. Pp. xi + 207. ISBN 9789027248480

A Substance-free Framework for Phonology

Chapter 7 - Segments and representations

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Phonetics and phonology

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A Substance-free Framework for Phonology

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