The Phonological Spectrum (review)

The stated aim of these volumes is ‘a comprehensive overview of current developments in phonological theory’. While this is an overstatement, the coverage is impressive.

Vol. 1, ‘Segmental structure’, has papers on nasality, voice, and miscellaneous topics. In ‘Nasal harmony in functional phonology’, Paul Boersma maintains that if one separates the perceptual from the articulatory, one gets a simpler account than if one does a purely phonological analysis. By contrast, in ‘Reinterpreting transparency in nasal harmony’, Rachel Walker, using a wider database of languages, accounts for nasal harmony transparency with an optimality theory (OT) approach, but must invoke controversial sympathy constraints in order to do so. Comparing these two, we see that accounting for crosslinguistic facts of nasal harmony is not trivial. Stefan Ploch, in ‘Can “phonological” nasality be derived from phonetic nasality?’, claims that nasal phonology is not derived from phonetics. He says a truly empirical ‘phonetic hypothesis’ must tightly connect phonetics and phonology. Since it does not (phonologically oral segments often have nasal airflow), the hypothesis is nonempirical. The paper briefly examines a cognitive alternative: element theory.

Mirjam Ernestus begins the voice section with ‘The role of phonology and phonetics in Dutch voice assimilation’, arguing that phonetic implementation best explains Dutch voicing. In OT terms, she asserts that in the output of the phonology, an obstruent is still unspecified for [voice]. Phonetics then determines the actual voicing. Caroline Féry’s excellent ‘Final devoicing and the stratification of the lexicon in German’ shows that while onset-based and coda-based approaches both handle core vocabulary, ambisyllabic obstruents in native vocabulary and borrowed words require different analyses, depending on the degree of nativization. She demonstrates three distinct degrees of nativization and proposes a corresponding lexical stratification. Markedness constraints appear once in the ranking, but faithfulness constraints are split depending on the source of the words, the faithfulness of recently borrowed words being ranked higher. Finally, Eon-Suk Ko, in ‘The laryngeal effect in Korean: Phonology or phonetics?’, argues that F0 raising after nonlenis stops is merely a strong phonetic effect rather than phonologized, though stronger than most other languages.

In the varied section ‘Time, tone, and other things’, Markus Hiller, in ‘The diphthong dynamics distinction in Swabian: How much timing is there in phonology?’, asserts a contrast between [ăi̯] and [aı̯̆], as well as other diphthongs, and that the difference is best represented in feature geometry with the prominent part of the diphthong represented under the vocalic node, and the less prominent part as (consonantal) place. Philipp Strazny’s ‘Depression in Zulu: Tonal effects of segmental features’ gives a good overview of tonal depression and proposes a new set of features and geometry to account for this. This also explains the locality of shift of high tone due to depressor consonants, as contrasted with the general mobility of high tones. In ‘Weakening processes in the optimality framework’, K. G. Vijayakrishnan examines both lenition and feature-specification loss in several languages of India. Loss of feature specification is captured by featural alignment to prosodic categories, while lenition (an upward shift in sonority) is handled as a harmonic process of assimilation. Finally, Onno Crasborn and Els Van Der Kooij’s ‘Base joint configuration in Sign Language of the Netherlands: Phonetic variation and phonological specification’ asserts that the position of the base joints of the hand is not contrastive, but rather a phonetic implementation due to other factors; they suggest that the term ‘handshape’ should be replaced by a more general ‘articulator’.

Vol. 2, ‘Suprasegmental structure’, has papers on syllable structure, stress, and prosodic structure of Dutch. The syllabic structure papers are all in a government phonology (GP) framework...