This paper provides an optimality-theoretic analysis of two types of contrastive verbal reduplication in Efik (Niger-Congo; Nigeria). Lexical contrast reduplication puts contrastive focus on the meaning of the verb while performance contrast reduplication puts contrastive focus on the tense/aspect of the verb. Lexical contrast and performance contrast reduplication have distinct phonological patterns in the affirmative but do not contrast in the negative, giving rise to three patterns (Cook 1985). I posit three verbal reduplicants, REDNEG, REDLEX, and REDPRF, and derive their segmental and tonal properties in Generalized Template Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995). I propose that REDLEX and REDPRF are affixes while REDNEG is a root. REDLEX and REDPRF exhibit TETU effects that REDNEG does not, including onset cluster simplification, coda deletion, monosyllabicity, and the absence of high vowels. These effects are derived by ranking various markedness constraints between IO and BR-Root faithfulness and BR faithfulness. As a root, REDNEG has faithful tones. I analyze the polar tone of REDLEX as a case of alternating fixed autosegmentism (a TETU effect driven by the OCP) and the fixed high tone of REDPRF as a case of morphological fixed autosegmentism. Finally, the constraint *HLH explains the tonal behavior of LH verbs.
This paper presents the results of a corpus study and an online loanword adaptation experiment examining the tonal adaptation of English loanwords in Mandarin. Using maximum entropy models, I control for the substantial influences of lexical tone distributions and standardisation, and uncover phonological determinants of tone beyond these lexical and conventional factors. The most important phonological determinant of tone in the corpus was English voicing, while in the experiment it was English stress-aligned pitch contours. I argue that these distinct tonal adaptation patterns constitute two different perceptual mappings, one from F0 perturbations to tone and the other from English intonation to tone, both arising due to particular borrowing contexts. I suggest that increasingly close contact between English and Mandarin may lead to more intonation-driven tonal adaptation in the latest wave of borrowing. The maximum entropy approach holds promise for the analysis of complex cases of tonal adaptation in other languages.
One source of phonetic variation is lexical competition, which has been shown to cause both hyperarticulation, especially of vowel formants (e.g., Wright 2004), and reduction, manifested as shorter segment and word durations (Kilanski 2009, Gahl et al. 2012). Studies have found that lexical competition (e.g., having a minimal pair competitor, having more phonological neighbors) causes contrastive hyperarticulation of the initial stop voicing contrast in English: greater competition makes VOT longer for voiceless stops and/or shorter for voiced stops (Baese-Berk & Goldrick 2009, Nelson & Wedel 2017). I conducted a corpus study that looked for contrastive hyperarticulation of the final stop voicing contrast in English. The cue examined was preceding vowel duration. I did not find contrastive hyperarticulation: neither minimal pair competitor existence nor higher neighborhood density caused vowels to be longer before final [d] or shorter before final [t]. Instead, both competition metrics correlated with shorter vowel durations before [t] and [d]. This result is consistent with Goldrick et al. (2013)’s failure to find contrastive hyperarticulation of the final stop voicing contrast and their hypothesis that competition affects initial and final contrasts differently. It is also consistent with Gahl et al’s (2012) finding that high neighborhood density causes reduction.
The role of phonetic naturalness in biasing the learning of sound patterns remains an unsettled question in phonology. The present study investigates naturalness bias in phonotactic learning using a novel experimental paradigm that tests whether learners reproduce a phonetically-motivated phonotactic implicational about the distribution of major place contrasts in stops. Stops differing in place of articulation are easier to distinguish word-initially than word-finally, so place contrasts in word-final position should also exist in word-initial position. The reverse is not necessarily true. This implicational is typologically supported as well as motivated by perceptual naturalness. In two artificial grammar learning experiments, I exposed participants to place contrasts in stops either word-initially or word-finally and tested whether they extended the contrasts to the other word-edge position. Participants successfully learned to recognize novel words that fit the phonotactic pattern they had been trained on, but they were equally willing to extend the place contrasts in both directions, yielding no evidence for naturalness bias. These results contrast with those of a similar study that found asymmetric extension of the stop voicing contrast, supporting an effect of naturalness bias. Confusion data suggests that the reduction in perceptibility from word-initial to word-final position may be greater for stop voicing than for stop place of articulation. This difference may underlie the divergent results of the two studies, leading to the hypothesis that the strength of a substantive bias depends on the magnitude of its phonetic precursor.
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