Introduction 2 0.1. Licensing: by cue or by prosody 2 0.2. Phonetics in phonology: the downward arrow and alternatives 3 0.3. An example of cue licensing: retroflexion 4 0.4. Cues 6 0.5. Cue weighting 9 0.6. Cue duration 10 0.7. The descriptive system 10 0.8. Excessive variability 13 0.9. Extensions 14 0.9.1 Direct reference to cues? 14 0.9.2 Intersegmental timing 15 0.9.3 Intrasegmental timing 15 0.9.4. Variable timing 16 Part I: Against syllable-based accounts of neutralization 1.1. Lithuanian 17 1.2. The representation of neutralized voicing 21 1.3. Word domain effects in voicing neutralization 24 2. Generalizing from Lithuanian 25 2.1. Greek and Sanskrit 25 2.1.1. Sanskrit 27 2.1.2. Greek 28 2.1.3 Aspiration neutralized 29 2.2. Voicing neutralization in Polish and Russian 30 2.3. German syllabification and devoicing 38 2.3.1 The facts 38 2.3.2. Correlations between neutralization and the syllable 40 3. A second voicing neutralization pattern: before obstr

Recent experimental work indicates that by the age of ten months, infants have already learned a great deal about the phonotactics (legal sounds and sound sequences) of their language. This learning occurs before infants can utter words or apprehend most phonological alternations. I will show that this early learning stage can be modeled with Optimality Theory. Specifically, the Markedness and Faithfulness constraints can be ranked so as to characterize the phonotactics, even when no information about morphology or phonological alternations is yet available. Later on, the information acquired in infancy can help the child in coming to grips with the alternation pattern. I also propose a procedure for undoing some learning errors that are likely to occur at the earliest stages. There are two formal proposals. One is a constraint ranking algorithm, based closely on Tesar and Smolensky’s Constraint Demotion, which mimics the early, “phonotactics only” form of learning seen in infants. I illustrate the algorithm’s effectiveness by having it learn the phonotactic pattern of a simplified language modeled on Korean. The other proposal is that there are three distinct default rankings for phonological constraints: low for ordinary Faithfulness (used in learning phonotactics); low for Faithfulness to adult forms (in the child’s own production system); and high for output-to-output correspondence constraints.

Many studies in the past decade have shown that "earlier is better " as far as learning a second language (L2) is concerned. That is, individuals who began learning their L2 in late adolescence or early adulthood ("late bilinguals") usually resemble native speakers of the L2 less than individuals who began learning their L2 in childhood ("early

This thesis focuses upon parallels between phonology and phonological processing. I study phonological speech errors and a phonotactic dissimilarity constraint, demonstrating they have analogous similarity and frequency effects. In addition, I show that abstract phonological constraints are influenced by the phonological encoding of lexical items. The results of this thesis are based on a metric of similarity computed using the representations of STRUCTURED SPECIFICATION (Broe 1993). This metric is quantitatively superior to traditional metrics of similarity which are based on feature counting. I also employ a probabilistic model of a gradient linguistic constraint which is based on categorical perception. In this model, the acceptability of a form is gradient, and acceptability is correlated with frequency. The most acceptable forms in a language are the most frequent ones. This constraint model provides a better fit to gradient phonotactic data than traditional categorical linguistic constraints. Together, the similarity metric and gradient constraint model demonstrate that statistical patterns in language can be relevant, principled, and formally modeled in linguistic theory. Using the gradient constraint model, I show that similarity effects in phonotactics are stronger word initially than later in the word. A parallel pattern is experimentally demonstrated

1 Synchronic and historical explanation Evolutionary Phonology. Evolutionary Phonology seeks to derive typological generalizations from recurrent patterns of language change, themselves assumed to be rooted in perception, production, and acquisition. The goal is to eliminate UG by providing diachronic explanations for the cross-linguistic evidence that has been used to motivate it. (2) shows a schema of this program, where the arrows can be read as “explains ” and/or “constrains”. 1

this paper we suggest some strategies for reuniting phonology and the rest of grammar in the context of a uniform constraint formalism. We explain why this is a desirable goal, and we present some conservative extensions to current practice in computational linguistics and in non-linear phonology which we believe are necessary and sufficient for achieving this goal. We begin by exploring the application of typed feature logic to phonology and propose a system of prosodic types. Next, taking HPSG as an exemplar of the grammar frameworks we have in mind, we show how the phonology attribute can be enriched, so that it can encode multi-tiered, hierarchical phonological representations. Finally, we exemplify the approach in some detail for the nonconcatenative morphology of Sierra Miwok and for schwa alternation in French. The approach taken in this paper lends itself particularly well to capturing phonological generalisations in terms of high-level prosodic constraints. 1. Phonology in Constraint-Based Grammar Classical generative phonology is couched within the same set of assumptions that dominated standard transformational grammar. Despite some claims that "derivations based on ordered rules (that is, external ordering) and incorporating intermediate structures are essential to phonology" (Bromberger & Halle, 1989:52), much recent work has tended towards a new model, frequently described in terms of constraints on well-formedness (Paradis, 1988; Goldsmith, 1993; McCarthy & Prince, 1993; Prince & Smolensky, 1993). While this work has an increasingly declarative flavour, most versions retain procedural devices for repairing representations that fail to meet certain constraints, or for constraints to override each other. This view is in marked contrast to the interpretation...

this paper I re-examine the case for distinguishing language-specific phonetics from phonology, and concludes that this move is unmotivated. It is feasible to account for 4 phonetic and phonological phenomena within a unified framework, and such a model is better able to account for the many similarities between phonetics and phonology. It is appropriate to distinguish components of grammar where the representations and principles operative in each component are fundamentally distinct, thus it is uncontroversial to distinguish phonology from syntax. It is difficult to justify a distinction between phonetics and phonology on these grounds. Phonetics and phonology are not obviously distinguished by the nature of the representations involved, or in terms of the phenomena they encompass. As far as representation is concerned, most of the primitives of phonological representation remain phonetically-based in the sense that features and timing units are provided with broadly phonetic definitions. This has the peculiar consequence that sound is represented twice in grammar: Once at a coarse level of detail in the phonology, and then again at a finer grain in the phonetics. Perhaps more significant is the fact that there are also substantial similarities between many phenomena which are conventionally classified as phonetic and those which are conventionally classified as phonological, for example coarticulation is similar in many respects to assimilation. The aim of this paper is to explore the idea that these parallels are best accounted for by analyzing both `phonetic' and `phonological' phenomena within a unified framework so the similar properties of the two can be derived from the same constraints. Unifying phonetics and phonology does not imply a denial of the distinct...

Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.* The generative paradigm of language description (Chomsky 1964, 1965, Chomsky & Halle 1968) has dominated linguistic thinking in the United States for many years. Its specific claims about the phonetic basis of linguistic analysis still provide the cornerstone of most linguistic research. Many criticisms have been raised against the phonetic claims of the Sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968), some from early on

There are currently many competing feature theories and models of segment-internal representations. Despite differences in detail, however, the general proposals are fairly uniform, each making minor modifications to the feature set of SPE (Chomsky and Halle, 1968) and the geometry of Clements (1985) – with two notable exceptions. First, Clements (1991) proposed an innovative unification of consonant and vowel place features, which greatly economized the set of place features. Second, all proposals for sign language depart radically from spoken language proposals. In this paper, we propose a very different model of feature geometry, in which the insights of Clements (1991) are extended to other areas of the phonology, and structural and featural economy are exploited to the greatest extent possible. This model not only eliminates a large number of features from the grammar (including the major class features), but it provides a unified analysis for consonants, vowels, place, manner, tones, complex and contour segments in spoken and signed languages. 1. Background on features and feature geometry It has long been established that the feature, not the segment, is the basic unit of

This paper reports results of a quantitative phonetic study of Kabardian, a Northwest Caucasian language that is of typological interest from a phonetic standpoint. A number of crosslinguistically rare properties are examined. These features include the phonetic realization of Kabardian’s small vowel inventory, which contains only three contrastive vowel qualities (two short vowels and one long vowel), spectral characteristics of the ten supralaryngeal voiceless fricatives of Kabardian, as well as the acoustic, palatographic, and aerodynamic characteristics of ejective fricatives, an extremely rare type of segment cross-linguistically. In addition, basic properties of the consonant stop series are explored, including closure duration and voice onset time, in order to test postulated universals linking these properties to place of articulation and laryngeal setting.