The Sonority Controversy

Sonority has a long and contentious history. It has often been invoked by linguists as an explanatory principle underlying various cross-linguistic phonotactic generalizations, especially within the domain of the syllable. However, many phonologists and phoneticians have expressed concerns about the adequacy of formal accounts based on sonority, including even doubts about the very existence of sonority itself. To date, the topic of sonority has never been the focus of an entire book. Consequently, this is the first complete volume that explores diverging viewpoints about phonological phenomena rooted in sonority taken from numerous languages. All of the contributors are well-known and respected linguists who publish their research in leading academic outlets. Furthermore, each chapter in this collection contains new, cutting-edge results based on the latest trends in the field. Hence, no other extant piece of literature matches this volume in terms of its breadth and coverage of issues, all converging on the common theme of sonority. Given the wide variety of subtopics in this collection, there is something to appeal to everyone — the list of contributions encompasses areas such as Optimality Theory, acquisition, computational modeling, acoustic phonetics, typology, syllable structure, speech perception, markedness, connectionism, psycholinguistics, and even MRI technology. What ties all of these issues together is a solid and consistent emphasis on sonority as a unified background phenomenon. Furthermore, a continuum of opinions about sonority is represented, ranging from complete acceptance and enthusiasm, on the one hand, to moderate skepticism on the other hand.

This comprehensive collection equips readers with a state-of-the-art description of clinical phonetics and a practical guide on how to employ phonetic techniques in disordered speech analysis. Divided into four sections, the manual covers the foundations of phonetics, sociophonetic variation and its clinical application, clinical phonetic transcription, and instrumental approaches to the description of disordered speech. The book offers in-depth analysis of the instrumentation used in articulatory, auditory, perceptual, and acoustic phonetics and provides clear instruction on how to use the equipment for each technique as well as a critical discussion of how these techniques have been used in studies of speech disorders. With fascinating topics such as multilingual sources of phonetic variation, principles of phonetic transcription, speech recognition and synthesis, and statistical analysis of phonetic data, this is the essential companion for students and professionals of phonetics, phonology, language acquisition, clinical linguistics, and communication sciences and disorders.

Sonority is a central notion in phonetics and phonology and it is essential for generalizations related to syllabic organization. However, to date there is no clear consensus on the phonetic basis of sonority, neither in perception nor in production. The widely used Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) represents the speech signal as a sequence of discrete units, where phonological processes are modeled as symbol manipulating rules that lack a temporal dimension and are devoid of inherent links to perceptual, motoric or cognitive processes. The current work aims to change this by outlining a novel approach for the extraction of continuous entities from acoustic space in order to model dynamic aspects of phonological perception. It is used here to advance a functional understanding of sonority as a universal aspect of prosody that requires pitch-bearing syllables as the building blocks of speech.This book argues that sonority is best understood as a measurement of pitch intelligibility in perception, which is closely linked to periodic energy in acoustics. It presents a novel principle for sonority-based determinations of well-formedness – the Nucleus Attraction Principle (NAP). Two complementary NAP models independently account for symbolic and continuous representations and they mostly outperform SSP-based models, demonstrated here with experimental perception studies and with a corpus study of Modern Hebrew nouns. This work also includes a description of ProPer (Prosodic Analysis with Periodic Energy). The ProPer toolbox further exploits the proposal that periodic energy reflects sonority in order to cover major topics in prosodic research, such as prominence, intonation and speech rate. The book is finally concluded with brief discussions on selected topics: (i) the phonotactic division of labor with respect to /s/-stop clusters; (ii) the debate about the universality of sonority; and (iii) the fate of the classic phonetics–phonology dichotomy as it relates to continuity and dynamics in phonology.

In this volume, notable scholars honor James W. Harris for his contributions to Romance phonology. Inscribed within generative grammar, the studies seek to explain various phonological processes, structured around glides, aspects of onsets/codas as well as stress and weight. This book will be a useful reference tool for specialists in theoretical phonology, language acquisition, language in contact, bilingualism, and Spanish dialectology.

This book provides a refreshing perspective on the description, study and representation of consonant clusters in Polish. What are the sources of phonotactic complexity? What properties or principles motivate the phonological structure of initial and final consonant clusters? In answering these questions, a necessary turning point consists in investigating sequences of consonants at their most basic level, namely in terms of phonological features. The analysis is exploratory: it leads to discovering prevalent feature patterns in clusters from which new phonotactic generalizations are derived. A recurring theme in the book is that phonological features vary in weight depending on (1) their distribution in a cluster, (2) their position in a word, and (3) language domain. Positional feature weight reflects the relative importance of place, manner and voice features (e.g. coronal, dorsal, strident, continuant) in constructing cluster inventories, minimizing cognitive effort, facilitating production and triggering specific casual speech processes. Feature weights give rise to previously unidentified positional preferences. Rankings of features and preferences are a testing ground for principles of sonority, contrast, clarity of perception and ease of articulation. This volume addresses practitioners in the field seeking new methods of phonotactic modelling and approaches to complexity, as well as students interested in an overview of current research directions in the study of consonant clusters. Sequences of consonants in Polish are certainly among the most remarkable ones that readers will ever encounter in their linguistic explorations. In this volume, they will come to realise that hundreds of unusually long, odd-looking, sonority-violating, morphologically complex and infrequent clusters are in fact well-motivated and structured according to well-defined tactic patterns of features.

Elements, Government and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology. It covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalisation of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government. In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalisations. The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles & Parameters programme, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Human Communication Sciences and Disorders is an in-depth encyclopedia aimed at students interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on human communication—both normal and disordered—across the lifespan. This timely and unique set will look at the spectrum of communication disorders, from causation and prevention to testing and assessment; through rehabilitation, intervention, and education. Examples of the interdisciplinary reach of this encyclopedia: A strong focus on health issues, with topics such as Asperger′s syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome, anatomy of the human larynx, dementia, etc. Including core psychology and cognitive sciences topics, such as social development, stigma, language acquisition, self-help groups, memory, depression, memory, Behaviorism, and cognitive development Education is covered in topics such as cooperative learning, special education, classroom-based service delivery The editors have recruited top researchers and clinicians across multiple fields to contribute to approximately 640 signed entries across four volumes.

The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language whose strongest cross-linguistic patterns are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure. Syllable patterns involving long sequences of consonants are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized, with few approaches treating these as natural or unproblematic structures. This book is an investigation of the properties of languages with highly complex syllable patterns. The two aims are (i) to establish whether these languages share other linguistic features in common such that they constitute a distinct linguistic type, and (ii) to identify possible diachronic paths and natural mechanisms by which these patterns come about in the history of a language. These issues are investigated in a diversified sample of 100 languages, 25 of which have highly complex syllable patterns. Languages with highly complex syllable structure are characterized by a number of phonetic, phonological, and morphological features which serve to set them apart from languages with simpler syllable patterns. These include specific segmental and suprasegmental properties, a higher prevalence of vowel reduction processes with extreme outcomes, and higher average morpheme/word ratios. The results suggest that highly complex syllable structure is a linguistic type distinct from but sharing some characteristics with other proposed holistic phonological types, including stress-timed and consonantal languages. The results point to word stress and specific patterns of gestural organization as playing important roles in the diachronic development of these patterns out of simpler syllable structures.