Common Phonological processes There are several kinds of familiar processes that are found in many many languages 1 Uncommon processes DO exist Of course through the vagaries of history languages can develop highly ideosyncratic patterns Example The Indo European RUKI rule s S RUKI This happens in Indo Iranian Slavic and Baltic RUKI r u k and i not a natural class 2 Common segmental interactions Assimilations Adjacent sounds become more similar to each other Examples total assimilation Latin octo Italian otto eight Old English myln Modern English mill Carribean Spanish casual speech process hasta asta ahta atta until partial assimilation PIE swep no Latin somnus sleep nasality Latin lupu Spanish lobo voicing English in tolerant intolerant in possible impossible in compatible i N compatible place English dog z rib z versus docks and rips voice 3 It makes sense to think of this as gestural interaction o gestures for adjacent segments overlap with each other nasality overlaps with vowel in camp o effects of gestures blend with each other tongue position in key vs coo However assimilation at a distance is harder to explain this way 4 Assimilation at a distance a challenge to an articulatory view of assimilation Consonant harmony PIE pekw Italic kwekw to cook ripen Latin kokw coquere to cook Vowel harmony Germanic umlaut mu s mouse mu si mice become mu s my s With unrounding y i and great vowel shift u au and i ai we have the modern English pronunciations 5 Common segmental interactions Dissimilations Adjacent sounds become more different from each other Examples Adjacent sounds may dissimilate Finnish kakte kahte na as two stop stop fric stop Greek ptero ftero feather fTinos ftinos cheap Dissimilation at a distance is more common Latin velal English velar note also alveolar and uvular but labial dental palatal Grassman s law Sanskrit bhabhuva babhuva became aspiration Dahl s law Kikuyu kikuju gikuju Kikuyu voicing K iche kaq kjaq red place 6 The perceptual motivation of dissimilation Increase the auditory perceptual contrast among sounds in a sequence syntagmatic contrast K iche kj is less like q than is k so the fact that the onset and coda have different place of articulation is enhanced by the palatalization The Greek change pt ft fT ft is doubly percepual in nature 1 dissimilates continuancy and 2 enhances place cues by having the consonant at the CV boundary be a stop stop place cues are stronger in CV position than in CC or VC position at the cost of increased homonymy 7 Prosodic structure plays a role in phonological processes Prosodic structure rhythm prominence grouping Rhythm units of timing syllable timing each syllable feels equal in rhythmic weight stress timing each stress foot feels equal in rhythmic weight syllables within feet alternate in weight mora timing each mora feels equal in rhythmic weight mora is easy to define in Japanese writing system less so in other languages Prominence emphasize a word in an utterance some combination of pitch pattern accent and or duration Grouping signal aspects of syntactic or discourse structure pause between syntactic or discourse units slow down between units pitch reset at boundaries low to high or high to low 8 Syllable position and articulation of consonants syllable onset rhyme nucleus coda draw tree structure Nucleus is vocalic usually or syllabic consonant Onset and coda are typically made up of consonants Tendency across languages to have more C contrasts in onset position Mandarin only nasals m n N in coda Korean 3 way stop series only occurs in onset position 9 The perceptual robustness of onset position The tendency for languages to permit more contrast in onset position may be driven by perceptual bias auditory information for place of articulation in stops particularly is greater in onset position Presence of stop release burst and formant transitions Informational importance of some onsets left to right word recognition process places greater weight on word onsets 10 Foot position and segment realization In stress timed languages the stress foot is composed of stong and weak syllables foot s w trochaic foot foot w s iambic foot ex garden ex about segments in weak syllables tend to be reduced 11 Some reduction processes vowel centralization vowel becomes like schwa emph tic e mph sis vowel deletion memorize mem o ry 12 Why reduction of unstressed syllables Articulatory weakening shorter less energy devoted to the production of unstressed syllables perceptual reinterpretation of weak syllable Talker mEmOri produced as mEm ri Listener mEmri recovered as mEm ri 13 An additonal factor in reduction frequency of usage Highly frequent words show a greater number of pronunciation variants in a corpus of conversational English There were 1516 occurrences of yknow with 232 different pronunciations