didyoudrinkmygingerale:
Does English, specifically American English, contain any instances of /mj/ ?
Because if it doesn’t that would explain beautifully why the English meow is the only one that doesn’t make use of an approximant…
:3 <3 ?
EDIT: Found my answer. /mj/ can exist, but only before /u:/ and /ʊɹ/ (mute, mural). This still works, though, because meow contains /aʊ/, shifting the /j/ to an /i/! :D Yayayay!
mute, immune, Mewtwo, munition, museum, music, municipal.
Goal for immediate future is to research and compose an original writing sample for grad school applications since the last paper I wrote in theoretical phonology now strikes me as spirited and hearted in the right place but vulgarly naive in some of the specifics. Thus I’ve decided to review the literature surrounding the computational complexity of Optimality Theory (OT). OT is basically the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” constraint-satisfaction theory of phonology where for a given underlying form, infinitely/indefinitely candidate surface forms are generated and filtered out according to an ordered list of constraints. Put another way, all possible outputs are run through a series of gauntlets and the one that comes out in the best shape is the winner and selected as the output.
The literature consists of proofs that OT is NP-complete and responses to the effect of “ur doing OT wrong”. We’re doing NP-complete proofs in my theory of computation class, so I get to capitalize on and reinforce my knowledge in complexity theory. The formal mathematical reasoning and fine-grained scholarship serve my ultimate rhetorical goal of trying to get accepted, but the exercise will not be trivial as I can study the intricacies of a theory maligned across the board in my linguistics department. So that’s good and I feel good about it. My main issue for writing therefore is coming up with something original to bring to the table. Right now, I’m considering a direction along the lines of “computational intractability is not the end of world; mental representation is.”
Latin dissimilates liquids (r’s and l’s), and by virtue of our partitioned lexicon of classical and Germanic roots and affixes, we English speakers also dissimilate liquids and we’ve gone our whole lives without knowing it.
Exhibit A: The normal -al affix
- radial, regional, hysterical, labial, digital, lateral, tribal
Exhibit B: The -ar words
- polar (pole), solar, angular, particular, vehicular, uvular, popular, cellular
What unites the B set is the fact that -lal is a funny way to end those words, so -lar is chosen instead. This is what is meant by dissimilated liquids: -lar is chosen over -lal. In contrast, the A set (once sufficiently extrapolated) will contain all and only the -al endings that are not -lal. There might be a couple exceptions—lunar is an analogy of the dissimilated solar—but if you encounter a random Latinish word that ends in /l/ and you need to make a quick adjective from it, you will instinctively choose -ar over -al.
As part of my project of condensing and archiving my phonology notes into one super awesome moleskine, I reviewed the arguments for the dual-level hypothesis in Kenstowicz 1994, and I found a token mention of the disutility of extreme behaviorist empiricism in phonology. YES! I exclaimed. Most of generative linguistics’ anti-behaviorist (hence psychologically meaningful) arguments come from syntax, as though the field is the discipline’s golden child. Which is a shame because the study of sound systems is the only part of linguistics that deals with real things located in reality! Words and sentences are abstract bundles of—wait for it—acoustic sound (or sign) made by the gestures of the human vocal tract (or hands)!
The argument is as follows: Strict behaviorism posits that there is no such thing as mental states and that the only thing we can know or discuss is overt human behavior. So a behaviorist theory of speech sounds can only refer to observable phonetic detail. For the untrained speaker, observably distinct sounds may all be perceived as being the same sound. /t/ has seven distinct realizations in American English: s[t]em, [tʰ]in, a[ɾ]om, in[ɾⁿ]ernet (bad IPA, I know), ro[ʔ]en, ten[]s (tents). We perceive sounds that are not actually present or at all similar. Moreover, /t/ is not the only sound with a null allophone—e.g. ten[]s (tends)—so there is no unique intersecting acoustic characterization of the /t/ category because (1) it overlaps with other categories and (2) has a null realization (the category intersects the empty set!). These facts cannot be adequately explained by strict behaviorism; instead we need to talk about /t/ not as a mere set of sounds but also as a mental construct that behaves accordingly to rules and information in the speaker’s mind. Our instincts allow us to recover neutralized distinctions (/t/ and /d/ can be [ɾ] or []) with categorical certainty, and the strongest theory of phonology requires abstract mental states and objects in addition to observable phonetic detail. Another nail in the coffin!
![As my previous post suggests, today is a linguistics-and-LaTeX day for me. I’m writing about Akan, the language I “adopted” for study in my African linguistics class. The image above shows autosegmental derivations from the word /fʊnɔ/ (‘to be emaciated’) in three dialects of Akan. Depending on the dialect, /fɔnʊ/ can be realized as [fɔ̃n], [fɔ̃ŋ] or [fɔ̃ʊ̃]. The sound changes at work in these words are fairly simple but the dialectal divergence and variety here is kind of nuts. [Data via E. N. Abakah, “Phonological analysis of word-final consonants in Akan”, 2005.]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_krv9ubTaWZ1qznraho1_500.png)
