What it means to be phonetic or phonological: the case of Romanian devoiced nasals

Abstract

phonological patterns and detailed phonetic patterns can combine to produce unusual acoustic results, but criteria for what aspects of a pattern are phonetic and what aspects are phonological are often disputed. Early literature on Romanian makes mention of nasal devoicing in word-final clusters (e.g. in /basm/ 'fairy-tale'). Using acoustic, aerodynamic and ultrasound data, the current work investigates how syllable structure, prosodic boundaries, phonetic paradigm uniformity and assimilation influence Romanian nasal devoicing. It provides instrumental phonetic documentation of devoiced nasals, a phenomenon that has not been widely studied experimentally, in a phonetically underdocumented language. We argue that sound patterns should not be separated into phonetics and phonology as two distinct systems, but neither should they all be grouped together as a single, undifferentiated system. Instead, we argue for viewing the distinction between phonetics and phonology as a largely continuous multidimensional space, within which sound patterns, including Romanian nasal devoicing, fall.

Incomplete neutralization and the blueprint model of production

“…Articulatory Phonology (AP; Browman & Goldstein, 1986, 1992, 1995) is a theory of production which collapses phonetics and phonology into a single source, unlike other theories (Kingston & Diehl, 1994;Tucker & Warner, 2010). AP claims that phonetics and phonology are just low and high level descriptions of the same dynamical system.…”

Gradient morphophonology: Evidence from Uyghur vowel harmony

“…If harmony may be gradient, then, in line with Cohn (2006), we should revisit our representational assumptions regarding phonology. One possible revision is to claim that all phonology is gradient, as argued in Pierrehumbert et al (2000), Tucker & Warner (2010), and Silverman (2006), among others. Essentially, these works contend that phonology and phonetics are not entirely distinct, but exist on a continuum, ranging from coarse, more categorical patterns to fine-grained, low-level phonetic detail.…”

Research methods in articulatory phoneticsII: Studying other gestures and recent trends

“…This is somewhat unexpected, as both methods can be considered similar in terms of invasiveness (with nasalance being even less invasive than pneumotachography). It should be noted, however, that a number of studies of nasal gestures have used the nasal airflow/nasalance method simultaneously with other methods, such as EPG (Shosted, 2011), ultrasound (Tucker & Warner, 2010), or both ultrasound and EGG (Carignan, 2018). The use of multiple methods increases the overall invasiveness and tends to limit participant sample sizes.…”