[BOOK][B] The phonetics of pronouns: articulatory bases of markedness

R Willerman - 1994 - search.proquest.com
R Willerman
1994search.proquest.com
It has been claimed (Bolinger & Sears, 1981; Swadesh, 1971) that closed-class morphemes
contain more than their share of simple segments. That is, closed-class morphemes tend to
underexploit the phonetic possibilities available in language inventories. To investigate this
claim, consonants and vowels used in pronoun paradigms from 32 typologically diverse
languages were compared to the total segment inventories of the same 32 languages.
Significant differences between the pronouns and the inventories were found in the relative …
Abstract
It has been claimed (Bolinger & Sears, 1981; Swadesh, 1971) that closed-class morphemes contain more than their share of simple segments. That is, closed-class morphemes tend to underexploit the phonetic possibilities available in language inventories. To investigate this claim, consonants and vowels used in pronoun paradigms from 32 typologically diverse languages were compared to the total segment inventories of the same 32 languages. Significant differences between the pronouns and the inventories were found in the relative frequencies of several articulatory variables. For instance, the relative frequency of clicks in pronouns is significantly less than the relative frequency of clicks in inventories.
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