Towards a typology of secondary articulations

Full text

Languages with
simultaneous
secondary articulations
Towards a typology of secondary articulations
Philipp Buech, Anne Hermes, Rachid Ridouane
Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie –UMR 7018 (CNRS/Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris)
Methods
•
Datasets: PHOIBLE (Moran & McCloy, 2019) & GLOTTOLOG (Hammarström et al., 2022)
•
Data basis: One randomly sampled phoneme inventory for each Glottocode in PHOIBLE
( = 2,177 phoneme inventories)
•
Python v3.10 (Van Rossum & Drake, 2009), Cartopy v0.20.2 (Met Office, 2015), PyMC3
v3.11.2
(Salvatier et al., 2016),Bambi v0.7.1 (Capretto et al., 2020)
•
Phonemes were grouped into Place according to the major category of their transcription;
Manner groupings were done partly according to Hayes (2009); Voicing according to
the feature [± periodicGlottalSource] (ambiguous values, e.g., "+,-", "-,+" were ignored)
Overview
Figure 2. Number of phoneme inventories by
secondary articulation.
Figure 3. Heatmap of the number of phoneme
inventories with two secondary articulations.
Place Manner
For detailed
analyses see:
Feature
-based principles
•
PLACE: Set of consonants with a secondary articulation
isinfe
rior to the set of their plain counterparts (Fig. 8)
•
MANNER: Secondary articulation most likely in plosives,
most unlikely in affricates and approximants (Fig. 6);
Most phoneme inventories have labialized and palatalized
stops; pharyngealization occurs in plosives and fricatives
(almost) alike
•
VOICING: The overwhelming majority of the phoneme
inventories has secondary articulations on obstruents. More
languages have secondary articulations on voiceless
obstruents
than on voiced obstruents (Fig. 7)
When
Feature-Economy counteracts Markedness:
•Labialization in Tashlhiyt, Rutul, Archi, etc. (Fig. 8)
•See also the case of pharyngealization in Tashlhiyt with
its
sixteen pharyngealized consonants.
Marked
Feature Avoidance (Clements 2009):
•Negative correlation: segments with secondary
articulation occur in fewer inventories (Fig. 4)
•Positive correlation: marked segments occur in larger
inventories: phoneme inventories with 3 sec art (≈62) >
phoneme inventories with 2 sec art (≈39) > languages
with
1 sec art (≈27) > phoneme inventories with 0 sec art (≈22
)
References
Capretto
, T., Piho, C., Kumar, R., Westfall, J., Yarkoni, T., & Martin, O. A. (2020). Bambi: A simple interface for fitting bayesian linear models in python. Retrieved May 2, 2022, from
bambinos.github.io/
bambi/ |Gordon, M. K. (2016). Phonological typology. Oxford University Press. |Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M., & Bank, S. (2022). Glottolog 4.5. Leipzig: Max
Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from www.glottolog.org |Hayes, B. (2009). Introductory Phonology. Wiley-Blackwell. |Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of sounds
.
Cambridge University Press.
|Met Office. (2015). Cartopy: A cartographic python library with a matplotlib interface. http://scitools.org.uk/cartopy |Moran, S., & McCloy, D. (2019). PHOIBLE 2.0.
Retrieved
May 16, 2022, from https://github.com/phoible/dev |Salvatier, J., Wiecki, T. V., & Fonnesbeck, C. (2016). Probabilistic programming in python using pymc3. PeerJ Computer Science, 2, 1–24.
https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj
-cs.55 |Van Rossum, G., & Drake, F. L. (2009). Python 3 reference manual. CreateSpace.
Voicing
Figure 5. Number of phoneme inventories by secondary
articulation and place.
Figure 8. Scatterplot and regression
estimates of the number of labialized
dorsal consonants by plain dorsal
consonants (with added jitter) with 95%
HDI. Phoneme inventories falling outside
the 95%HDI are marked with their
language name.
Figure 7. Number of phoneme inventories by
secondary articulation and
sonorant/obstruent (top) and voicing
distinction (bottom).
Figure 4. Mean consonant inventory size (blue) and
number of inventories (red) by number of secondary
articulations.
Figure 6. Number of phoneme inventories by secondary
articulation and manner.
Introduction
•
Maddieson (1984) with some reference to secondary
articulations in about 317 languages
•
No address of secondary articulations in
other studies (e.g., Gordon, 2016)
•
Research aim: Quantitative typological overview of
labialization, palatalization, pharyngealization, and
velarization using a large dataset
General
observations
•
~ 23% (502/2,177) of the phoneme
inventories have at least one secondary
articulation
•
Order by frequency: labialization >
palatalization > pharyngealization >
velarization (Fig. 2)
•
If a phoneme inventory has two
secondary articulations, labialization
and
palatalization pattern most often
together
(Fig. 3)
•
If a phoneme inventory has
simultaneous
secondary articulations (e.g., /mʷˠ/ in
Satawalese), labialization is always one
of them:
➢Labialization + Palatalization (N=5)
➢Labialization + Pharyngealization (N=3)
➢Labialization + Velarization (N=2)
Languages with 2
secondary articulations Languages with 3
secondary articulations
Labialization Palatalization Pharyngealization Velarization
Geographical distribution
Figure 1. Geographical distribution of secondary articulations.