Phoneme Inventories
Examination of the IPA (International Phonetic
Alphabet) reveals great diversity in the types of sounds found in languages of
the world. Sounds are differentiated along various dimensions, including place
of articulation, manner of articulation, laryngeal setting, airstream
mechanism, and timing of articulatory gestures. In this chapter presents some
of the salient cross-linguistic patterns identified in a number of
cross-linguistic surveys of phoneme inventories, including Maddieson’s
pioneering genetically balanced survey of
137 languages
in Patterns of Sounds. the online version
of its expanded 451-language
counterpart UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID), several
chapters of World Atlas of Language Structure, and the PHOIBLE database, which
contains segment inventories of 1,672 languages,
of which those in UPSID constitute a subset. the discussion in this chapter
centers on phonemes, sounds that are used contrastively to differentiate words.
3.1 Cross-linguistic distribution of phonemes
In
discussing the typology of phonemes, it is common to impose a broad bifurcation
between consonants and vowels, where consonants involve a tighter constriction
in the vocal tract than vowels. Consonants differ widely in the location and
degree of the constriction ranging from those produced with a slight narrowing
at the lips, i.e. bilabial approximants, to those associated with a complete
closure at the larynx, i.e. glottal stops. In addition, other properties such a
laryngeal setting (e.g. voiced vs. voiceless vs. ejective), nasalization,
secondary articulations (e.g. labialization, palatalization,
pharyngealization), and relative timing of gestures. Maddieson’s (1984) survey of phoneme inventories in 317 languages reveals a wide range in the number of
phonemes found in languages of the world from a low of 11 in the
East Papuan language Rotokas (six consonants and five vowels)and in the Mura language Pirahã (eight consonants
and three vowels) to a high of 141 in the
Khoisan language !Xũ.
Maddieson (1984) finds
no tendency for a compensatory relationship between the number of vowels and
the number of consonants in a language such that more vowels implies fewer
consonants and vice versa.
3.2. Consonant
According
to Maddieson’s the common consonant
there are 20 which conflates the dental vs alveolar. But according to
reset proven by Maddienson there are 24
language contrast dental and alveolar place of articulation. The most
‘representative’ of consonant there are five such as /z/, /ts/, /x/, /v/, dj/.
3.2.1. Plosive
Is the common for language to contrast
unaffricated oral stops. There are three places of articulation are (
billabial, denti-alveolar and velar ). Fourth place if the affricates included
is ( palato-alveolar ). Most of language possess of unaspiratates. Voiceless stop and voice stop. After voiceless
unaspirates and voiced stops, he common laryngeal setting for stops are
voiceless unaspirates and voiced less aspirated (28.7 %), ejective (16.4 % ),
and implosive ( 11.0%). Between the voiceless stops, dental and alveolar ( 6.0%
) which comtrast dental and alveolar,
( 89.3 % )velar, and ( 82.9% ) and voiced stops velars ( 55.2 % )
relative to both billabial ( 62.8 % ), dental alveolar ( 61,5 % ).
3.2.2. Fricative
According to the picture was proven that there
are two kind of fricative voiceless counterpart only for billabial pair ( β / θ
) and the non-sibilant dental pair ( δ / θ ). The modal of fricative in language
is two the most common fricatives being dental/alveolar /s/ followed by / ʃ / (
46.1 ) and f (42.6 % ) according to the
Maddieson’s survey all of the
Australian continent 15 lack fricative
with the 298 languages only additional sic case of fricative less
language.
3.2.3. Nasals,
liquids, and Non-liquid approximants (glides)
For the first step it discuss about Nasals. The
vast majority of t he world’s nasals are voiced. Virtually all languages
contrast nasal s at two (31 .9%), three (30. 0%), or
four (26. 2%) places of articulation with the two most
common nasal s being a dental/alveolar one (found in 95. 3% of
languages) and a bilabial nasal (found in94 .3 %). The
next most common nasal is a velar one (found in 53 .0% of
languages) followed by a palatal or palate - alveolar one (39. 4%). And
now about liquids, Most languages
have one (23. 3%), two (41. 0%), or three (14 .5 %) liquids (laterals and rhotics),
in languages with two
liquids, it is most common to have one lateral and one rhotic (83. 1%of languages wit h two liquids) with two lateral (13. 8%) and
two rhotic systems (2. 3%) being rare. In languages with three liquids,
it is slightly more common to have two
laterals and one rhotic (50. 0% of languages with three liquids) than one lateral and two rhotics (37. 0%), with
three liquid systems consisting entirely of laterals being much sparser (13.0 %). Most laterals are plain voiced approximants (74 .7% of laterals) with most of these occurring in
the dental/alveolar region (86 6%). And other non-liquid approximants such as
labial- palatals or velars are quite rare, each occurring in fewer than %of languages in the survey, although it is
likely that many of the sounds described as voiced non-sibilant fricatives are,
in fact, voiced approximants
VOWELS
Vowels
belonging to different subcategories within these three height and backness
groups are collapsed. For example, the high front unrounded vowels include both
high and lower high vowels, i.e. /i, ɪ/, the mid front rounded vowels comprise
both /e, ɛ/, and the low vowels include low vowels of different backness,
height, and rounding specifications, i.e. /a, ɑ, ᴂ, ɐ, ɒ/. Both short and long
vowels are included since height often co-varies with length. Secondary
features such as nasalization and voice quality are not included.
The five
most common vowels are (taking the cardinal vowel symbol as the prototype for
each category) /a, e, o, i, u/. In contrast, relatively few languages contrast
multiple degrees of height for high or low vowels. There is a considerable
drop-off in frequency after /a, e, o, i, u/ to the next most common vowel /ə/, which is followed in turn by /ɨ/, /ɯ/, /y/, /ʌ/, /ø/, /ɵ/, and /ʉ/.
Phonemic Lenght
In the -language WALS
sample, there is a bias for phonemic length in vowels over consonants: a total
of languages could be reliably identified as contrasting length for one or
more vowel qualities morpheme-internally, while only were described as
contrasting length tautomorphemically for one or more consonants.
There is considerable
variation between languages in how much short segments outnumber their long
counterparts, but the clear trend is for a strong statistical bias in favor of
short phonemes. The paucity of long exemplars is not merely due to the long
segments constituting a subset of the short segments, since in most languages,
either all or virtually all of the short sounds have phonemic long
counterparts.
It should be noted that
the number of languages that make length distinctions for consonants would
increase considerably, however, if geminates arising across morpheme boundaries
were also considered, e.g. English mundaneness, cattail. It should also be
noted that length distinctions co-vary with qualitative distinctions in some
languages, potentially making the source of certain vowel distinctions
problematic to classify. For example, the tense high and mid vowels /i, u, e,
o/ of English are phonetically longer than their lax counterparts /ɪ, ʊ, ɛ, ɔ/
(Peterson and Lehiste ).
The greater statistical
discrepancy between short and long consonants (relative to short vs. long
vowels) is attributed in part to distributional restrictions holding of
geminates that do not apply to single consonants.
Language-internal
frequency data fail to consistently line up with the sonority- sensitive
continuum along the x-axis in Figure ., an inconsistency that is perhaps not
surprising given the existence of exceptions even on a categorical level. The
relative frequency of geminate voiceless stops compared to geminate voiceless
fricatives is thus mixed: in Japanese and Hausa, long voiceless stops are more
frequent than long voiceless fricatives, whereas the opposite pattern obtains
in Finnish, Koasati, and Italian. Similarly, geminate sonorants are more common
than geminate voiceless stops in Finnish and Hausa, whereas the opposite trend
is observed in Japanese and Italian
3.5 Explaining the typology of phoneme inventories
There is
an extensive literature devoted to explaining cross-linguistic biases in the
distribution of phonemes. Most of this research proposes explanations that are
rooted in considerations of speech production and/or perception, although
accounts differ in whether they appeal directly to phonetic factors or
indirectly through the medium of phonological features. (Adaptive) Dispersion Theory Targeting vowels
as a case study, Liljencrants and Lindblom
is the first typologically informed attempt to quantify the phonetic
forces claimed to condition phoneme inventories. Liljencrants and Lindblom
hypothesize that phoneme inventories are preferable to the extent they possess
contrasts that are maximally distinct in the perceptual domain. Their account,
commonly termed Dispersion Theory (or Adaptive Dispersion Theory), is
intuitively appealing since it fits with the observation that five vowel
inventories characteristically consist of the wellspaced set /i, e, a, o, u/
rather than other hypothetical inventories making less use of the vowel space,
e.g. /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, a/ or /i, y, u, ʊ, ʉ/.
Compares
the inventories predicted by the Liljencrants and Lindblom model with the most
common vowel inventories comprising from three to seven vowel qualities
according to the UPSID database (see Schwartz et al a for
similar results based on the language original survey by Maddiesone). Searches were conducted for vowel
inventories possessing the targeted number of vowel qualities, filtering out
distinctions based on length and limiting the search to monophthongs without
any secondary constrictions (e.g. frication, pharyngealization, retroflexion),
laryngeal modifications (laryngealization, breathy voicing, devoicing), or
nasalization.
The fit
between the Liljencrants and Lindblom model and the most common three-vowel
inventory is perfect. Their model also generates the most common four-vowel
inventory. In the case of the five-vowel system, the mid back vowel that is
most common cross-linguistically corresponds to a lower unrounded vowel in the
Liljencrants and Lindblom simulation. The most common central vowel in
languages of the world is schwa whereas the Liljencrants and Lindblom
simulation predicts a higher central vowel, /ʉ/ for the six-vowel. System and both /ɨ/ and a high central /ʉ/ or high front /y/ in
the case of the sevenvowel system. Furthermore, in predicting four high vowels
/i, y or ʉ, ɨ, u/ and
only two central vowels /ɛ, ɔ/ for the seven-vowel system, the Liljencrants and
Lindblom model diverges sharply from the cross-linguistically dominant pattern
of two high /i, u/ and four central /e, ɛ, o, ɔ / vowels in seven-vowel
inventories.
Dispersion
Focalization Theory Drawing on results of an analysis of vowel inventories in
Maddieson’s original language survey (Schwartz et al. a) Schwartz et
al propose a revised model for predicting vowel inventories, the Dispersion
Focalization Theory. They retain the original insight of Liljencrants and
Lindblom’s Dispersion Theory according to which inventories containing perceptually dispersed
vowels are preferred, but they introduce certain changes to their model in
order to provide a better fit to attested patterns.
The
first element in their model, the vowel inventory, crucially includes a notion
of focalization, which incorporates a boost to the quantal vowels, i.e. vowels
with two formants in close proximity (Stevens see section, including the three
corner vowels /u/, /a/ (both with proximate first and second formants), and /i/
(close third and fourth formants). The
second component contributing to the aggregate energy of a vowel system in Dispersion Focalization Theory captures the
overall auditory dispersion of the vowels in a system. Dispersion is a function
of first formant values and an integration of the second, third, and fourth
formants, where formant values are expressed in Bark. In their dispersion
function, Schwartz et introduce a variable that allows for an increased
weighting of first formant values (the acoustic correlate of height), capturing
the fact that larger vowel systems, i.e. those consisting of peripheral vowels
beyond just /i, e, a, o, u/, overwhelmingly tend to fractionate the vertical
rather than the horizontal space to produce more height than backness
contrasts.
Becker’s enormous survey of formant patterns for
vowels in languages has
dispelled certain fallacies suggested by typological surveys based on
impressionistic transcriptions. For example, he finds no support for the
purported distinction in the height of the back vowel between two of the most
common four-vowel systems /i, e, a, o/ and /i, e, a, u/ Rather, the back vowel
in both systems tends to be intermediate in height between canonical /o/ and
canonical /u/. Along similar lines, Becker observes that the distinction
between systems with a single central vowel that is high, i.e. /ɨ/, vs. those in which the central vowel is mid,
i.e. /ə/, is
not confirmed acoustically; instead, the vowel in question is intermediate in
height between the two central vowels, i.e. IPA /ɘ/.
One
typological observation that has proven elusive to implement in a model incorporating dispersion and focalization is
the preference for schwa over all vowels other than /i, e, a, o, u/. Schwartz
et al concede that another nonperceptual factor, namely ease of articulation,
is likely important in predicting the popularity of schwa. In fact, as they
observe in their companion typological survey, Schwartz et al note that schwa
is typically simply added as an additional non-peripheral vowel without
interacting with the spacing (at least in an impressionistically salient way)
of the peripheral vowels. This observation suggests that perceptual distance is
not the only factor guiding the construction of vowel inventories; otherwise,
one might expect to see an avoidance of mid vowels, or possibly low central
vowels, in languages with schwa.
The role of articulatory ease in shaping vowel
inventories also appears to be evident in languages with so-called “vertical”
vowel systems, e.g. Abkhaz (Hewitt 1979, Vaux
and Psiypa 1997a),
Kabardian (e.g. Turchaninov and Tsagov 1940, Abitov et al. 1957, Catford 1948, Choi 1991, Colarusso 1992, Gordon and Applebaum 2006) and Marshallese (Choi 1992), in which the entire inventory of two or
three vowels is central. Vaux and Samuels
(2015)
provide a comprehensive critique of dispersion theory, which they demonstrate
is not equipped to handle the full range of typological variationn in vowel
systems.
3.5.1.3 Aticulatory
complexity and perceptual saturation
Lindblom and meddieson
(1988) propose a model of consonant inventory construction incorporating
maximization of perceptual distinctness and minimization of articulatory effort.
They suggest that features can be broken down in to three groups according to
their articulatory complexity. Lindblom and Maddieson test the predictions of
their model by dividing the obstruent inventories for the language. Results
indicate a strong cross-linguistic tendency for languages to possess the eleven
basic obstruents before introducing obstruents belonging to the elaborated
articulations. Similarly, complex articulations tend to come into play only
after extensive exploitation of elaborated consonants, typically in consonant
inventories of greater than 30 consonants. Results of Lindblom and Maddieson’s
study cccomplement the work of Liljencrants and Lindblom (1972) and Schwartz et
al on vowel inventories by offering support for the role of both articulatory
and perceptual factors in the shaping of consonant inventories. An important
issue left unresolved in Lindblom and Maddieson’s work, however, is how to
quantify the distinction between basic articulations and their more complex
counterparts.
3.5.1.4 Quantal theory
Steven’s Quantal Theory
(19722, 1989) provided phonetic grounding for the still widely adopted
articulatory-based feature set orginally proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) .
Stevens proposes that phonological features define regions of acoustic and perceptual
stability in which changes along a continous articulatory dimension result in
relatively little change in the acoustic output.
In vowel systems, the
quantal vowels are /i/, /u/, and /a/ since they occupy stable articulatory
regions where minor shifts in tongue position result in only negligible
acoustic and perceptual changes. A further virtue of the quantal vowels that is
incorporated in to the Dispersion Focalization.
Quantal Theory has not
been developed as estensively as Dispersion Theory in various incarnations.
Evidence suggest, though, that it has some of the same shortcomings related to
its failure to incurporate a notion of articulatory ease. The prevalence of
schwa and the existence of vertical vowel systems are thus problematic for
quantal theory.
3.5.1.5 Feature enhancement
that features can be divided into two
groups, a primary and a secondary group. The primary features include the
manner features [sonorant] and [continuant] and the place feature [coronal],
all of which can be implemented independently of other features. This differs
from secondary features, which may be
restricted in their distribution as a function of the specification of primary
features also associated with that sound. For example, only coronal consonants
have the possibility of being contrasted in terms of the feature [distributed],
which encodes the breadth of a consonant constriction in the front–back domain.
A
further difference between primary and secondary features is that a change in
the specification of a primary feature results in a more salient acoustic and
thus auditory response than a change in a secondary feature.
The typology further supports a distinction
between [continuant] and [distributed] in their salience.
Stevens
and Keyser’s theory offers an account for why certain types of sounds are more
common than others cross-linguistically. For example, sonorants are
overwhelmingly voiced because the primary feature [+sonorant] ideally combines
with the secondary enhancing feature [+voice].
The consonants that result from the optimal
combinations of primary and secondary features, /j, w, s, f, h, n, l, m, t, p,
k/, are all typologically favored.
3.5.1.6
Feature economy
Another
common feature of phoneme inventories that was mentioned earlier in the context
of vowel systems is symmetry Clements (2003, 2009)
provides an explicit formalization of the principles that lead to the formation
of symmetrical inventories. According to his theory of feature economy, which
takes as a starting point long-standing observations about the structure of
sound systems (de Groot 1931, 1948, Martinet 1955), languages prefer inventories that make
maximal use of the minimum number of phonological features to expand their
phoneme inventories.
Clements
tests the cross-linguistic validity of feature economy through case studies of
certain combinations of sounds based on the 451-language UPSID database
(Maddieson and Precoda (1990)
In particular, he tests two predictions made by
the theory of feature economy. The first of these, Mutual Attraction, predicts
that sounds will occur more frequently if all of their features are present in
other sounds in the same language. For example, a voiced labial fricative is
predicted to be more common in inventories that already contain another labial
sound, another fricative, and another voiced sound, since adding a voiced
labial
fricative boosts the economy index of the
language by exploiting features that are independently employed in the language.
A
companion prediction of Clements’s theory of Feature Economy is that sounds
will be less likely to occur if one or more of its features are not
distinctively used elsewhere in the language. This effect of Avoidance of
Isolated Sounds works against a plosive inventory like the one in Chickasaw
(Table 3.5 ), which
contains a single voiced stop, the only segment for which voicing is
contrastive in Chickasaw. For example, /b/ is less likely to occur in a
language without both /d/ and /g/ than in a language with at least one of the
two. This means that Chickasaw is typologically unusual in having only a single
voiced stop.
Voiced
fricatives require a delicate articulatory balancing act for aerodynamic
reasons. It is difficult to simultaneously sustain voicing in the face of the
pressure build-up behind a fricative constriction while also generating
sufficient airflow through the constriction to make the fricative turbulence
audible. Clements (2009)
hypothesizes that intralanguage frequency plays a decisive role in determining
markedness, such that sounds
that are less frequent in a language are more marked than others. Two other
factors to which Clements (2009)
appeals in his theory are Robustness and Enhancement. Robustness entails the
existence of a hierarchy of features ordered in terms of their phonetic
salience.
The
work by Stevens (1972) and
Stevens and Keyser (1989)
discussed in 3.5.1.4 potentially
serves as the backbone for an explicit metric of Robustness, though Clements
suggests that the mapping between perceptual salience and typological frequency
is not always transparent. For example, clicks would appear to be perceptually
salient (though they are difficult to temporally order relative to adjacent
sounds) since they involve a rapid increase in energy at their release, but
nevertheless they are crosslinguistically
rare. Under Lindblom and Maddieson’s account
(section 3.5.1.3)
incorporating articulatory ease in addition to perceptual salience, clicks are
typologically rare due to their articulatory difficulty.
Clements
2003 addresses the issue of whether the economy that he captures with reference
to phonological features could actually reflect a phonetic preference for
gestural economy. In other words, it could be the case a priori that featural
economy is really articulatory economy that could be modeled more directly with
reference to gestures rather than indirectly via phonological features encoding
the articulatory gestures.
To tease
apart the two possibilities, Clements compares the predictions of the Browman
and Goldstein (1989) model
of articulatory phonology in which gestures are captured via features
referencing properties such as
the primary articulator and the location and
degree of the constriction. In the Browman and Goldstein model, labiodental and
labial articulations are distinguished since only the former involves the upper
teeth.
Clements
tests the predictions of the two theories of economy by assessing the
likelihood of /f/ occurring in a language with /p/ and /s/ (both extremely
common sounds) versus one in which either /p/ or /s/
is missing. As the feature-based theory of
economy predicts, /f/ is in fact more common in languages with at least one
bilabial and one other fricative.
Frequency of sounds within languages
It is instructive
to assess the frequency of sounds within languages to determine the extent to
which sounds that are typologically more common are also relatively common in
languages that have other cross-linguistically rarer types of sounds.it is also
a reasonable hypothesisthat the frequency of phonemes within a language mirrors
their cross-linguistic frequency.
In order to quantify the relative commonness of
sounds within languages, frequency of occurrence was examined for a set of 34
languages whose genetic diversity is roughly commensurate with that of the WALS
sample.There are two Slavic languages included in the survey, Czech and
Russian, but Czech is only used in the tabulation of vowels and Russian only in
the figures for consonants.
Figure plots
the frequency of occurrence of
the 25 consonants most frequently attested cross-linguistically
as compared to the intra- language frequency (computed as the ratio of the
observed number of tokensrelative to the number of expected tokens were each
sound to occur with equal frequency) for the surveyed languages. For the small
set of languages (Basque, Kayardild, Malayalam, Martuthunira, and Tiwi)
contrasting dental and alveolar sounds, frequency values reflect the place
associated with the higher relative frequency of the two since the typological
frequency data conflates the dental and alveolar categories for languages not
contrasting the two (which is most languages of the world). Similarly, for the
language contrasting dental/alveolar trills and taps (Basque), the
intralanguage frequency data corresponds to the frequency of the more frequent
of the tap or trill, since sources providing the cross-linguistic frequency
data on /r/ are often inexplicit about whether the rhotic is a trill or tap.o
the intra- language frequency.
Historical sound changes may also play a role in
boosting (or reducing)
language-internal frequency. For example, glottal stop in Samoan is descended
from proto-Polynesian *k which has the second highest mean frequency among the
sampled languages.The frequency of a sound may also be inflated due to
historical mergers. For example, intervocalic /l/ from Latin merged with /r/ in
Romanian, a sound change that contributes to /r/ being by far the most common
consonant in Romanian occurring at a level more than three times greater than
chance (Renwick 2011).
in some languages were open to reanalysis as
phonemic /x/. Similar possibilities for reanalysis hold for the phonetically
similar /w/ and /v/. According the figure plots the number of occurrences of
the 13 most common vowels from the 451-language UPSID survey against their
frequency (relative to other vowels) in the 29-language frequency sample. To be
consistent with the UPSID values, vowels in the frequency sample are separated
into three height categories (high, mid, and low) and, in the case of non-low
vowels, three backness categories (front, central, and back) and two rounding
categories (rounded, unrounded).
Vowels belonging to different subcategories
within these three height and back- ness groups are collapsed. For example, the
high front unrounded vowels include both high and lower high vowels, i.e. /i, ɪ/,
the mid front rounded vowels comprise both /e, ɛ/, and the low vowels include
low vowels of different backness, height, and
rounding specifications, i.e.
/a, ɑ, ᴂ, ɐ, ɒ/.
The frequent vowels within languages, /ø, y, ɨ,
ɯ/, are also among the five least frequently attested vowels (of the top 11).
The two frequency metrics diverge, however, in certain respects. Most striking
is the clear separation in frequency between the five cardinal vowels /a, e, i,
o, u/ and other vowels in the UPSID survey contrasted with the more gradual
cline in language-internal frequency proceeding from more com- mon vowels to
rarer ones.Furthermore, schwa occurs with greater frequency within languages
than three of the cardinal vowels /e, o, u/, even though schwa is considerably
less common across languages.
The frequency distributions within languages As discussed , sound changes typically alter
frequency patterns. For example, a merger of two phonemes inflates the frequency
of one while either eliminating the other (in the case of an unconditioned
merger) or reducing its frequency (in the case of a conditioned merger). (Potentially the frequency of both phonemes
could be reduced if the output of the merger were a phoneme that differs
from either of the merged ones.) Under the assumption that sound change is
characteristically driven by phonetic and functional considerations, one would predict that languages would
display an overall drift (with local deviations) toward an increase in both the
number of phonetically preferred phonemes and their frequency relative to other
phonetically less advantaged phonemes.
Marten suggests that
speakers are sensitive to considerations of phonetic naturalness even at the
lexical level when choosing words to borrow and coining new words.
Martin hypothesizes that words
with phonetically advantaged phonemes are preferentially
introduced into languages, thereby increasing the frequency of those preferred
phonemes relative to others.
He explores this hypothesis
through a study of Romance historical phonology and models the diachronic
development of frequency distributions through a series of computer simulations
employing a neural network speech processing model.
The distribution of
phonemes is quite consistent at the two stages of English, though there are
some differences that Martin (2017:7) discusses. One difference is that
voiceless obstruents are more common in modern English, which is due to the
loss in modern English of a once productive rule of intervocalic voicing.
Martin (2007,2009)
provides an account of the distribution of phonemes using a spreading
activation model of speech encoding (Dell 1986). In this type of model, nodes
encoding various levels of linguistic representation ranging from high-level
semantics down to low-level phonological features are hierarchically
interlinked via weighteActivation spreads between nodes as informa- tion is
accessed. For example, the word zebra would activate the lexical node
associated with the word, those associated with other lexemes belonging to the
same semantic field (e.g. lion, giraffe, cheetah, etc.), those associated with
the CV and CCV syllable structures of zebra, those associated with the
morphological category noun, with the phonemes /zibɹɑ/, with the features
comprising those phonemes, etc. A particular lexical item is selected when its
activation level reaches a certain threshold, where nodes associated with more
frequently occur- ring properties have higher resting activation levels. d
connected nodes.
In Martin’s account,
words that enter the lexicon tend to contain commonly occurring phonemes. A key
factor that contributes to the likelihood of a lexical item gaining traction in
the community of speakers is its phonetic attributes. Martin suggests two
potential mechanisms by which an asymmetric statistical skewing in favor of /b/
over /d/ could emerge diachronically assuming a starting point without this
bias and no systematic sound change that would have elimin- ated /p/ in certain
contexts. One possibility is that /d/ could have phonetically less voicing than
/b/ for articulatory reasons just discussed, which could lead to the
misperception of /d/ as voiceless /t/ (but not /b/ as /p/) over time on a
lexeme- specific basis, thereby asymmetrically lowering the frequency of /d/.
Alternatively, it is conceivable that speakers preferred to retain, borrow, or
coin words that began with /b/ over
those that began with /d/, a bias that
would lead to a synchronic skewing in favor of /b/.
This suggests that
the bias in favor of /b/ in French stems from other sources beyond inheritance,
including borrowings and the creation of new words from existing ones
through word-derivation processes such
as compounding and suffix addition or
loss, e.g. bêche ‘spade’ from bêcher ‘to dig’, dureté ‘hardness’ from dur
‘hard’. Borrowings in fact show a split in their behavior depending on the
source of the borrowed word. Words that were re-borrowed from Latin,
predominantly consisting of religious or scientific terms, were skewed in favor
of initial /d/ ( 77 borrowings from Latin beginning with /d/ versus 31 starting
with /b/), a bias that Martin suggests might be an artifact of the documented
statistical bias in favor of /d/ (by roughly three to one) that existed in the
Latin vocabulary.
Drawing on this
finding from French, Martin incorporates a notion of articu- latory ease into
his spreading activation
model by assigning higher resting activation levels to nodes associated
with articulatory gestures that are easier to implement. Through a series of
computer simulations of his model, Martin shows that the addition of a sufficiently
weighted factor of articulatory ease is able to allow even a comparatively rare
but phonetically preferred phoneme to
gain eventual statistical prevalence, as in the case of /b/ in the progression
from Latin to French.
3.7 Phoneme
inventories : a summary
The modal number of consonant across languages
languages is 21 and the modal number of vowel is five, though the number of
vowel rranges from three to 46 and the number of consonants from sixto 95.
There are consint of consonant and vowel more common cross linguistically
within languages. Evidence suggest that some combination of the competing
factors of minimizing articulatory effoert the while perceptual
differentiaayion is pivotal in predicting the structure of phoneme inventories.
