Speaker: Daniel Currie Hall (Saint Mary's University)
Title: Contrast and redundancy: What does
phonology know, and when?
Time: Friday, March 1, 3pm
Place: Sid Smith 560A
Abstract:
It has often been observed that the contrastive or redundant status of a
feature (on a particular segment, in a particular language) is relevant to
how that feature behaves phonologically. There is less agreement, however,
as to precisely how contrastiveness exerts its influence. This talk
addresses two crucial pieces of this puzzle. First, how are features
identified as contrastive or redundant? I argue that a set of contrastive
feature specifications for a given inventory must be (a) one that is
sufficient to differentiate all the phonemes in the inventory and (b) one
in which every feature that is assigned serves to mark some phonemic
distinction. I contrast this with a narrower definition of contrast based
on minimal differences between phonemes, and show that the broader
definition allows for a stronger claim about the importance of contrast:
Only contrastive features are visible to the phonological computation. This
point is illustrated with examples of vowel patterns in Uyghur, Inuktitut,
and Anii. Second, what is the role of non-contrastive features? Here, I
examine data from Yowlumne Yokuts to argue that phonology must be able to
insert redundant feature values into representations, but that it does not
need to be able to see those feature values once it has done so.
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