Li6 Phonology and
Morphology
External evidence
Why external evidence?


Ohala 1986: “natural experiments”
 he rates “ludlings as #2, only to experiments”
 Spawned from limited data set, thus not subject to
the history/ convention critique levelled against
phonological patterns in the regular language.
Can reveal hidden properties of lexical items and
rules not visible in native phonological system:

trumped/blocked by inherited patterns
• sC- clusters in English vis a vis Pierrehumbert & Nair 1995

native lexicon doesn’t provide right environments
• musth, Zrelak, sixth(sed)n
Acquisition
Acquisition

L1
r and glides study
 chain shifts
 click girl


L2
spontaneous postulation of opacity
 DEC effect in Korean acq of Eng

Acquisition of r liaison



Newton and Wells 2002
Acquisition of liaison consonants by kids exposed to BrE:
 Homorganic j and w liaison mastered by 2;4
 Both linking-r and intrusive-r appear suddenly at 3;0
“the suggestion that /r/ liaison can be described with /j/ and /w/ liaison
as simply the audible results of patterned variations in timing (Gick
1999:52) is not born out by the developmental data here. If this were
the case, one would expect to observe /r/ appearing at around the
same time as the other types of liaison. In fact, it does not; it emerges
much later.” (Newton and Wells 2002:292)
Loanwords
Modern Hebrew

Bat-El 1994

borrowed nouns may enter
phonological modification
the
language
with
no
• supermarket, bank, e-mail, shopping, star

all borrowed verbs are modified so as to fit into the verbal
pattern
•
•
•
•
•
•

tilfen ‘telephone’
fintez ‘fantasize’
irgen ‘organize’
kod ‘code’  kided ‘encode’
flirt ‘flirt (n)’  flirtet ‘flirt (v)’
faks ‘fax (n)’  fikses ‘fax (v)’
Evidence for root template, spreading
Accidental vs systematic gaps
 (South)
Korean word-initial r
 Native words: disallowed; > n
 Loan words: allowed
 English ž
 Native words
• occurs only medially (leisure, measure…)
 Loan
words
• allowed elsewhere (Jacques, garage…)
Variation

Choice of adaptation is not necessarily driven
by phonological markedness in the borrowing
language

e.g. adaptation of [θ, ð]
• European French: [s, z] vs. Canadian French: [t, d]
• There is also individual variation
Hidden effects
Could be active in native phonology, but native lexicon doesn’t present the
requisite structures

Japanese stress assignment wrt voiceless vowels
Turkish SSP-violating clusters at word edges
Convergent cross-linguistic solutions to phonotactic violations in borrowing situations,
despite lack of evidence in recipient language (Steriade)



•
Epenthesis in initial consonant clusters
•
Egyptian Arabic TR (bilastik ‘plastic’) vs. sT (istadi ‘study’)
Relevant structures exist natively, don’t show the effect

Japanese stress assignment
Turkish voicing
Korean /s/ wrt [t] (to be discussed in a minute)
Derived Environment effects, e.g. in Polish pagoda : pagut
Avoidance effects





•
•
Sixths in Japanese
OCP effect with geminates (Heo & Lee 2004)
1.
2.
3.
Honolluru ‘Honolulu’
solliroki ‘soliloquy’
Marayaram~Mallayaram ‘Malayalam’
Where do hidden effects
come from?

Language Acquisition Device/UG
LAD provides limited set of
hypotheses (BV)
 UG provides default rankings of
correspondence constraints (Steriade)


Statistical knowledge…
Korean borrowing of Coda [t]


Korean word-final [t|]  /t, th, t’, č, čh, č’, s, s’/
Surface word-final postvocalic [t] in loans and nonce
words invariably assigned to /s/ (Martin 1992, Kang
1998, Hayes 1998, Iverson & Lee 2004)


supermarket  nom. [supəmakhet|], dat. [supəmakhese]
What appears to be involved in the Korean case is that
speakers know that surface word-final [t]s most often
come from underlying /s/ in their native lexicon, and
they therefore assign all new words to the same
pattern.
Tip of the Tongue
effects
What TOT effects show


Storage of redundant prosodic information
 Vaux 2003
Independence of syntactic and phonological
information in lexical access
 Miozzo and Caramazza 1997
 The availability of gender in TOT states suggests
the independence of syntactic from phonological
information in lexical access.
Speech errors
What speech errors reveal

Evidence for phonological elements (features, phonemes, prosodic elements (Rime, syllable…),
rules…)



The “syllable position effect”



“sound errors occur at a level of representation that is phonological rather than phonetic. When sounds
are misordered, they acquire the allophonic characteristics suitable for their new environments (Fromkin
1971, Wells 1951 ). For example, the /k/ in Katz is phonetically a front /k/, yet in the error Fats and Kodor
for Katz and Fodor, the /k/ becomes a back /k/ accommodating to the back vowel /o/ in Kodor. This
suggests that the unit that is misordered is phonological rather than phonetic and, more generally, that
there exists a phonological representation in production and it is at this level that these kinds of sound
errors occur.” (Dell 1986)
Abstract underlying representations (e.g. Fromkin 1971:34, cut the string  cunt the strig)
Stemberger found that more than 90% of ordering speech errors invert onset-onset, coda-coda
Implicit rule learning (Dell et al. 2000—see next slide)
Bifurcated grammar (LF vs. PF)



Word exchange errors, such as "I left the briefcase in my cigar" (when what was intended was "I left the
cigar in my briefcase"; Garrett 1980) readily cross phrase and even clause boundaries.
They differ in this respect from sound exchanges, such as "he caught tourses" (when what was intended
was "he taught courses"; Fromkin, 1973). Sound exchanges are most common within phrases and are
strictly clause bounded (phrasal speech planning)
This leads to a distinction between one level of representation that codes the proximity of elements in the
surface string (PF) and one that does not (LF).
Dell et al. 2000

Observation

“Phonotactic Regularity Effect”: Speech errors almost always follow the phonotactics of
the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [ŋ], the [ŋ]
will always appear in a Coda (Wells 1951, Boomer & Laver 1968, Fromkin, 1971, Motley
and Baars 1975).
• Violations such as [ætk] ‘act’, [dlorm] ‘dorm’ constituted less than 1% of Stemberger’s 1983
phonological error corpus

Curiosity


Method




Participants recite lists of CVC syllables in 4 sessions on different days.
In the first 2 experiments, some Cs were always onsets, some were always codas, and
some could be both.
In a third experiment, the set of possible onsets and codas depended on vowel identity.
Results


Do speakers compute and apply these phonotactics online?
In all 3 studies, the production errors that occurred respected the phonotactics of the
experiment.
Conclusions


Implicit learning of the sequential constraints present in the stimuli.
The language production system adapts to recent experience.
Language games
and toy grammars
What are language games?
Also called ludlings, secret languages, language
disguises, play languages…
 not technically separate languages
 rather, they consist of 1-2 simple phonological
rules appended to the grammar of an existing
language


they normally manipulate phonological elements
such as phonemes and syllables
Some other English games




Cockney rhyming slang
Ubbi Dubbi/Ob/Oppen Gloppen/Pig Greek
 Tubo bube ubor nubot tubo bube
The Name Game
Pig Elvish
 Ovemë heten irstfë étterlé óten héten ndëen; hentë, fïén ódingca äen
ordwë fóén 3 ëttërslá róen esslë, ddaén näën "en" ndíngeth; fïen odingcá
äén órdwí fóén 4 ëtterslú roën órema, ddäën äen "th" ndïngeth fién hëten
óvedmï etterlá sién aen ówelvú, lsëeth ddáen äën ándomrí ówëlvë.
Héntï, hangëcí lläen "k" ótén "c". Ástlylú, ddáën ándómrú ccéntsáth nóen
óptën fóen hëten etterslï.
Identity avoidance

Name Game



“But if the first two letters are ever the same, I drop them
both and say the name. Like Bob, Bob drop the B like ob Or
Fred, Fred drop the F go red Mary, Mary drop the M so ary
That's the only rule that is contrary.”
Fee fie mo Ichael (not *Michael)
w-, y-, and h-dialects of Pig Latin



W: way vs. a
Y: you vs. ooh/eww
H: who vs. ooh/eww
Complex Onsets:
dialect variation with truck
90
77.7
80
70
60
50
40
30
19.4
20
10
2.1
0
uck-tr-ay




ruck-t-ay
uck-tray
(transpose entire onset)
ruck-tay
(transpose initial C)
ruck-tray
(transpose entire onset, retain 2nd C)
No productions of *tuck-ray, *tuck-tray!
ruck-tr-ay
(n = 449)
(n = 112)
(n = 12)
VCV-initial words:
dialect variation with oven
40
36
35
30
25
20
15.6
14
15
9.3
10
8.1
7.6
6.2
1.9
5
1
0.7
0.2
0.2
0.2
oven-ov-
w-oven-
ay
w-ay
0
oven-ay
ven-o-ay oven-way oven-hay oven-yay en-ov-ay
NULL
ven-ov-ay oven-v-ay h-oven-h- y-ovenay







oven-ay
(add -ay)
ven-o-ay (initial  transposition)
oven-way
(add w)
oven-hay
(add h)
oven-yay(add y)
en-ov-ay (initial  transposition)
no output
(n = 208)
ven-ov-ay
oven-v-ay
(n = 90)
(n = 82)
(n = 54)
h-oven-h-ay
y-oven-y-ay
ven-ay
(n = 47)
(n = 44)
oven-n-ay
(n = 36)
w-oven-w-ay
oven-ov-ay
yay
(copy max  + del.)
(1st consonant copying)
(add h, overapplication!)
(add y, overapplication!)
(delete first V)
(add n)
(add w, overapplication!)
(copy max )
(n = 11)
(n = 6)
(n = 4)
(n = 2)
(n = 2)
(n = 2)
(n = 1)
(n = 1)
Tuvan overwriting reduplication

Common assumption among phonologists:




Non-alternating structure is stored as such in underlying forms.
Alternating structure is not stored in URs.
Alternation Condition (Kiparsky ‘68), Lexicon Optimization (P&S ‘93)
Kaun and Harrison 2000:
 Observation: Tuvan VH: all vowels in a root agree wrt [back]
 Question: does vowel harmony apply to non-alternating forms?
 Method: teach subjects Jocular Reduplication; see if new V triggers
root harmony

• Replace first vowel of root with [a]
nom ‘book’
 nom-nam
• If root vowel is [a], replace it with [u] at ‘name’
 at-ut
Results: harmonic forms reharmonize, disharmonic forms don’t
• Harmonic words
idik ‘boot’  idik-adık (not *adik)
• Disharmonic words mašina ‘car’  mašina-mušina (*mušı/una)
Tuvan overwriting reduplication

Conclusions:



Disharmonic forms are fully specified underlyingly
Harmonic forms are not (“Free Ride”, McCarthy 2004)
Theoretical implication:

Generalisations can be formed over non-alternating
phonological material
idik
|
[-bk]
m a š i n a
|
|
|
[+b] [-b] [+b]
Conclusions
External evidence is not only useful in elucidating
the structure of phonological representations and
processes, but in fact appears to be vital
 EE bears on important questions such as:

whether phonological generalisations exist in the
mind of the individual that are not revealed via
internal evidence
 productivity of processes and constraints
 contents of representations
 nature of learning processes

References
Bat-El, Outi. 1994. Stem modification and cluster transfer in Modern Hebrew. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 12:571-596.
Dell, Gary. 1986. A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review 93.3:283-321.
Dell, Gary, K. Reed, D. Adams, and A. Meyer. 2000. Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: A study of the role of
experience in language production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 26:1355-1367.
Gick, Bryan. 1999. A gesture based account of intrusive consonants in English. Phonology 16:29-54.
Heo, Young-Hyon, and Ahrong Lee. 2004. The phonological adaptation of foreign liquids in Korean. LSO Working Papers in Linguistics 4: 47–52.
Linguistic Student Organization, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
P&S ‘93
Kaun, Abigail and David Harrison. 2000. Pattern-responsive lexicon optimization. Proceedings of NELS 30, A. Coetzee, Ji-Yung Kim, Masako
Hirotani, and Nigel Hall, eds. Amherst, MA: UMass Graduate Linguistic Students’ Association.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1968. Linguistic universals and linguistic change. In Bach, Emmon & Harm, Robert, eds., Universals in linguistic theory. New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 170–202.
Martin 1992
Kang 1998
Hayes 1998
Iverson & Lee 2004
McCarthy, John. 2004. Taking a Free Ride in Morphophonemic Learning. ROA 722-0305.
Miozzo, Michele and Alfonso Caramazza. 1997. Retrieval of Lexical-Syntactic Features in Tip-of-the-Tongue States. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 23.6:1410-1423.
Newton, Caroline and Bill Wells. 2002. Between-word junctures in early multi-word speech. Journal of Child Language 29:275-299.
Ohala, John. 1986. Consumer guide to evidence in phonology. Phonology 3:3-26.
Pierrehumbert, Janet and R. Nair. 1995. Word games and syllable structure. Language and Speech 38.1:77-114.
Wells 1951
Boomer & Laver 1968
Fromkin 1971
Motley and Baars 1975
Stemberger, Joseph. 1983. Speech Errors and Theoretical Phonology: A Review. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Vaux, Bert. 2003. Syllabification in Armenian, Universal Grammar, and the Lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry 34.1:91-125.