phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

Here’s a follow up to the [aj] discussion - I promised my own formant plot in an earlier post.

It’s below, including a trajectory of the [aj] in five against the vowel in cot, and it appears as if the nucleus of the diphthong indeed goes through the same space as the plain back vowel.

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Bernard Tranel recently wrote to ask me if I “have come up with a satisfactory textbook for an undergraduate introduction-to-phonology course”. My reply was that I haven’t ever used a textbook for any introductory phonology course that I’ve taught; I always just use problem sets.

I know that many phonologists (and probably plenty of other types of linguists) use the same approach, but my particular inclination comes from having been an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz. Most if not all core linguistics courses were (and probably still are) taught without a textbook; the one exception that I recall clearly was — somewhat ironically — Phonology I, which I took from Armin Mester in the Winter of 1990. (By the way, Phonology I at UCSC was and still is numbered LING 101. Very appropriate, I think.)

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Judging by Mark Liberman’s vowel plots it looks like I was off the mark on the rarity of back nuclei in the [aj] diphthong. At least, it looks like the nucleus in Mark’s five passes through the same space as the back vowels in his caught and cot. My excuse here is that my Canadian ear hears them all as central. I’ll try to get a microphone and record similar plots for my own speech, just for fun.

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Bob Kennedy raised some interesting points about the trajectory of the initial vowel in "Mike", "Diane" etc. — let’s call it long i for ease of reference, since the appropriate IPA values are part of what’s at issue.

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I’ve just added a couple links to my blogroll (set of links to the right, just below the calendar, most of them to blogs but some not) that I thought deserved special mention. One of them is Sally Morrison’s The Language Feed, “a weekly roundup of language news articles found around the web” (noted last night on LINGUIST List). The other is a very similar site, Dominic Watt’s language and linguistics in the news (which I’ve abbreviated “lg and lx in the news” in the blogroll). These are both excellent resources for news items about language for introductory linguistics courses and for blog rants.

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Eric, I was going to post this as a comment, but couldn’t figure out how.

Just a quick reaction to the diphthong bit. Nice of Eric to blame the journalist instead of the linguist. Anyway, among my thoughts about diphthongs here, I might have some hairs to split.

I think we’ll agree that [aj] is usually not front. And it’s probably too understanding of us to attribute such a statement to an awareness of its underlying specification.
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Earlier today, Mark Liberman commented on Language Log about a study by Amy Perfors that has gotten some recent media attention.

Perfors has a nice, informal summary of the study and its results here, but for those of you who just don’t wanna follow the links: in a nutshell, Perfors claims to have found that men whose names (in English) have stressed front vowels are rated as somewhat more attractive than men whose names have stressed back vowels, while women whose names have stressed back vowels are rated as somewhat more attractive than women whose names have stressed front vowels. So, Craig is (statistically) somewhat hotter than Paul, but Laura is hotter than Jamie. (And hence the relevance to phonoloblog.)

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A variant of the distinction between strongly and weakly unattested forms is the distinction between phonotactically prohibited forms and accidental gaps. What we want to do is distinguish between strings of 0 frequency which the grammar says can’t occur and strings of 0 frequency which the the history of the language has accidentally never produced. Recent work by Elliott Moreton (see his dissertation and 2002 paper in Cognition) shows how these two kinds of 0s can be distinguished experimentally. The case in point was [tl] vs [pw], where the former is prohibited and the latter accidentally absent. Moreton showed that when asked to judged a continuum from [l-w] after [t], listeners gave many more “w” responses than “l” responses, but after [p]. there was no comparable bias toward more “l” than “w” responses. The “w” bias after [t] shows that listeners are trying to identify the sonorant as the one that is phonotactically legal in its context, and the lack of an “l” bias after [p] shows that they are under no similar compulsion to avoid strings that accidentally don’t occur. In short, it is possible to tap experimentally a language user’s knowledge of their grammar in such a way as to distinguish between strongly vs weakly unattested forms.

When I wrote that “[c]rucial nonordering of rules has probably also been explicitly discussed and has possibly also been rejected somewhere in the rule-ordering literature“, what I meant by “crucial nonordering of rules” was a situation in which two rules directly interact (i.e., they are in a potentially feeding or bleeding relationship with respect to at least some subset of forms) but are crucially unordered with respect to each other — perhaps leading to optionality, as crucial nonordering of constraints does in OT.

Bob Kennedy then asks:

Out of curiosity, would disjunctive rule-ordering be an example of non-ordering?

I think not, but I can sort of see how disjunctive ordering might be thought about in this context. This is the topic of this post.

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No, not of the emergency broadcast system. I’m testing comments on this blog.

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