Languages that have both aspirated stops and the phoneme /h/ often manifest a close parallel in their distribution. Previous work in phonology either has failed to recognize this close parallel or does not formally account for it. For example, American English witnesses a close parallel in the distribution of /h/ and aspirated stops that has largely gone unrecognized in the phonological literature. This paper offers a detailed optimality-theoretic analysis of the distribution of aspirated stops and /h/ for both American English and Korean. For each of these languages we delineate their distribution and show how an optimality-theoretic analysis can account for it. We develop an alignment analysis of their distribution that makes reference to constraints that require positions of prominence (such as word-initial or foot-initial position) to be aligned with the feature [spread glottis]. We further demonstrate how the alignment analysis predicts a typology of patterning of aspirated stops and /h/. Crucially, the typology does not predict that every language should have a close parallel in their distribution like American English, but as we show, it predicts a range of patterns that are instantiated. Languages that have both aspirated stops and the phoneme /h/ frequently manifest a close parallel in their distribution. This is not surprising given that such sounds are characterized by the feature [spread glottis] (henceforth, [s.g.]). Previous work in phonology either has failed to recognize the close distributional parallel between aspirated stops and /h/ or does not formally account for it. For example, virtually none of the work on American English phonology observes the similarity of distribution that exists between them. In this paper we develop an alignment analysis of the feature [s.g.] that accounts for the close parallel in the distribution of /h/ and aspirated stops. In the first part of this paper we illustrate the close
This article compares an extensive collection of English loanwords into Korean with a corpus of perceptual responses to English productions by Korean students of English in Korea. The analysis selects ten obstruents situated in four prosodic contexts: initial, final, and pre- and poststress intervocalic positions. Analyses compare the mapping of the obstruents onto Korean categories in the two databases, finding a strong logistic relationship between them, which indicates a process of loanword adaptation as a regularization of the cross-language perception patterns. This conclusion is also supported by differences in the maps across the prosodic positions, wherein loanword differences are correlated with perceptual differences, and by the fact that loanword adaptations are more variable for consonants that do not have a very robust perceptual map. The data, however, also exhibit exceptional cases that apparently indicate effects of a historical lexicalization of individual forms, as well as of an explicit sociocultural standard. Thus, loanword adaptation in this case, though largely indicative of a perceptual base, is more than just synchronic perception.
Phenomena associated with consonant-vowel interactions are examined relative to three general models of feature geometry which differ in the planar relationship of consonants and vowels. The data come from reports of developing phonological systems, both normal and disordered. Geometric analyses reveal that consonants and vowels are fully integrated in the earliest stages of development such that the place specification of consonants is primarily derived from the vowel. However, change through development requires modifications either in the principles of place association, the degree of feature specification, or the planar representation of consonants and vowels.
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