‘Voice’ languages with no [voice]? Some consequences of Laryngeal Relativism

Cyran, Eugeniusz

doi:10.1556/2062.2017.64.4.1

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…BARONI's (this volume) work on the place elements |A, I, U| goes in a similar direction, advocating a closer tie between elements' (phonetic) identity and phonological behaviour than what has been traditionally assumed in the framework. Conversely, Cyran's (2014Cyran's ( , 2017) laryngeal relativism, which proposes that some voicing systems may phonologically be treated more like aspiration systems and vice-versa, clearly moves away from the narrow mapping assumptions that have long been made about the fortis and lenis primitives (|H| and |L|, respectively) in Element Theory (cf. e.g.…”

Section: Primitives and Substancementioning

confidence: 99%

The structure and content of phonological primitives

Veer¹,

Botma²,

Breit³

et al. 2023

Primitives of Phonological Structure

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This chapter presents an overview of our current understanding of the nature of the phonological primitives, the smallest units at the core of phonological representation and computation. We argue that there are many more open questions about the primitives than there is agreement. We discuss many of the fundamental questions faced by phonological theory on various aspects of phonological features, ranging from their formal structural properties (e.g. types of opposition, valency, atomicity), to their relationship with phonetic correlates (e.g. representationalism, articulatory vs acoustic correlates, substance), to their origins (e.g. innateness, emergence), taking into account a large range of positions on each of the issues discussed. We show that despite significant fragmentation on many of these issues, there is also much common ground which should leave us optimistic about progress on the many questions that remain open.

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Section: Primitives and Substancementioning

confidence: 99%

The structure and content of phonological primitives

Veer¹,

Botma²,

Breit³

et al. 2023

Primitives of Phonological Structure

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show abstract

“…Similarly to Durham English, a word like brak 'lack' changes its /k/ to [ɡ] in pre-sonorant position, e.g., brak oceny 'lack of mark', brak jasności 'lack of clarity' (Cyran 2012: 154). Such cases are explained by Cyran (2012Cyran ( , 2014Cyran ( , 2017 as the passive voicing of an unmarked (i.e., tenuis) obstruent, which also seems to apply in Durham (although Cyran (2014), basing his analysis on somewhat different, more abstract theoretical considerations, proposes to treat Durham English as an aspiration system). Whatever the analysis, the fact that Durham English exhibits this voicing process that only applies across word boundaries (while there are no reports of it having final devoicing) lends further support to the claim that it is the manifestation of an unexpected, hybrid phonological system.…”

Section: Hybrid Laryngeal Systems In Varieties Of Northern Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accent boundaries and linguistic continua in the laryngeal subsystems of English

Bérces¹

2022

LingBaW

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A parallel is drawn between the northernmost regions of England represented by Durham and Yorkshire and the transition zone Ouddeken (2016) identifies between voicing and aspiration languages in the Dutch-German dialect continuum. It is argued that, owing to historical changes and dialect contact, the Northern Englishes discussed exhibit hybrid laryngeal systems as a result of being geographically intermediate between Scots in Scotland, which is a voice language similar to Dutch, and mainstream varieties of English spoken more to the south in England (and in most of the rest of the English-speaking world), which are aspiration systems of the German type. We model the emergence of laryngeal systems as the setting of three parameters: (i) whether the laryngeally marked/specified obstruent series contains [voice] (L-system) or [asp] (H-system); (ii) whether the laryngeal prime is able to spread (right-to-left); and (iii) whether the system has pre-obstruent delaryngealisation (POD) (due to which in C1C2, C1 becomes unmarked/underspecified). While spreading L with POD derives voice languages and non-spreading H with no POD derives aspiration languages, two mixed combinations derive the intermediate categories of Durham and Yorkshire (spreading L & no POD and spreading H & no POD, respectively). We also show that all remaining combinations are attested cross-linguistically or else theoretically uninterpretable.

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“…More recently, Cyran (2012Cyran ( , 2014Cyran ( , 2017 has proposed what he refers to as Laryngeal Relativism, i.e., the idea that as long as a sufficient phonetic distance is kept between the two sets of obstruents to maintain phonological contrast ("sufficient discriminability in production and perception"), both the marked and the unmarked sets may receive any (more or less arbitrary) phonetic interpretation. That is, phonetic interpretation is partly systemic (phonological).…”

Section: Laryngeal Relativismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laryngeal Relativism predicts Italian

Bérces

Huszthy

2018

Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting

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Two-way laryngeal systems are classified by Laryngeal Realism into [voice] languages (or “L-systems”, e.g., Slavic, Romance) and [spread glottis] ([sg]; or aspiration) languages (or “H-systems”, e.g., the typical Germanic pattern). More recently, Cyran (2014) has proposed Laryngeal Relativism (LR), claiming that phonetic interpretation is arbitrary, and as a result, two phonetically identical systems, even two dialects of a language, may turn out to diverge phonologically. His example is Polish: while Warsaw Polish represents the typical [voice]/L-system, he analyses phonetically identical Cracow Polish as an H-system (counter to Laryngeal Realism’s uniform classification of Slavic languages). However, in the “classical” version of [sg] languages (e.g., English), no laryngeal activity in the form of any kind of spreading is attested, which suggests the absence of any source element and, instead, a dominant role of obstruency (|h|). We, therefore, arrive at a three-way typology: h-systems, H-systems and L-systems. At the same time, arbitrary phonetic interpretation in LR predicts the existence of, e.g., h-systems with virtually no aspiration in the fortis series. We claim that this is indeed the characterisation of Italian. Using data from potential feature spreading situations, elicited in loanword and foreign accent settings, we show that Italian is an h-system, exhibiting no true laryngeal activity.

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‘Voice’ languages with no [voice]? Some consequences of Laryngeal Relativism

Cited by 7 publications

References 46 publications

The structure and content of phonological primitives

The structure and content of phonological primitives

Accent boundaries and linguistic continua in the laryngeal subsystems of English

Laryngeal Relativism predicts Italian

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