ab st rac t This paper examines the phonological structure of French rhotics and their treatment in a production grammar. Assuming emergent featural specification, it is argued that the underlying representation of /R/ contains only values for sonorance, continuance and place of articulation. Grammatical analysis is undertaken in an Optimality Theoretic framework, where evaluation highlights the effect of effort reduction and perceptual augmentation on /R/, also demonstrating that more richly specified segments are unaffected by these constraints. The proposal is shown to be compatible with antecedent analyses and data from regional forms and registers. i nt roduc t i onThis article examines the phonological representation of French /R/. 1 Based on the premise that form emerges from language use and that abstract structure is acquired, rather than innate, it is argued that /R/ is structurally minimal, including only values for continuance and dorsality in most varieties of French. Variable surface forms are shown to be the product of phonetically based constraints, the interaction of which is formalised in a broadly Optimality Theoretic (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) grammatical model. It is noted that the unique representational minimalism of /R/ renders this segment particularly sensitive to phonetically based constraints.The article proceeds as follows. The first section examines the phonetic and phonological characteristics of French /R/, surveys previous accounts, and addresses larger issues associated with rhotic sounds. An alternative specification of /R/ is advanced in the second section, drawing upon non innatist and emergent featural theories. The third section focuses on grammatical treatment * I am grateful to three anonymous referees for suggestions in making this paper more coherent. Thanks also to B. Tranel and B. Bullock for useful comments on earlier versions of this work. It goes without saying that all remaining shortcomings are my own.
Pidgin and creole languages are found throughout the world, with relatively greater concentrations in the Caribbean basin, the Indian Ocean, the coast of Western and Central Africa, and Oceania. In most literature, pidgins and creoles are grouped according to respective lexifiers, from which the bulk of their vocabulary derives. Emerging in contact environments, pidgins and creoles have been profoundly influenced by sociolinguistic forces and offer compelling evidence of the extent to which extra-grammatical factors contribute to the shape of language. This chapter pursues two questions. What is the interest of these languages to contemporary sociolinguistics? And how can the adoption of a sociolinguistic posture better address the distinction of creole from non-creole?
This article examines sound change in French Lexifier Creoles and the neutralization of contrast involving the feature [round]; secondary concerns include the nature of diachronically related inputs, base richness and decreolization. Phonological restructuring is described in an Optimality Theoretic grammar distinguishing between perceptual, declarative and procedural strata. Base richness holds only at the declarative stratum, as input to the perceptual and procedural strata are constrained by experience and feature licensing, respectively. Explanation of phonological restructuring centers on the perception grammar, where constraints refer to the parsing of experiential input. In the incipient creole, neutralization of contrast predicated by [round] is initially attributed to substrate grammatical transfer, reflecting first language attenuation. The possibility of creole-specific learning or attenuation to second language contrasts is also addressed and shown to lead to distinct output scenarios, depending upon the reranking of constraints under each stratum. Crucially, reranking at either the declarative or procedural strata is dependent upon learning at the perceptual stratum; rankings that do not mirror those of either the lexifier or substrate lead to output variability, the frequency of which is hypothesized to frame the eventual stabilization of representations.
This article examines the influence of perception on creole phonological restructuring, drawing comparisons to loanword adaptation and second language learning and outlining a formal framework within which change can be described and explained. The three scenarios of contact-induced modification are compared and contrasted, focusing on the nature of contact, the role of different source and target languages, and the means by which participants access source tokens. Data from Haitian, showing diachronic modification to lexifier rhotics, is used to illustrate the position that perception may be the primary causal factor in phonological modification in some instances. It is argued that source ambiguity and substrate (L1) perceptual knowledge underlie restructuring. Perceptual competence is formalized in a broadly Optimality Theoretic grammar using level-specific constraints referring to the parsing and categorization of experiential input. Putative substrate data are used to establish a perceptual grammar which, when applied to experiential input, predict attested outcomes in Haitian.
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