Description, theory and explanation in phonology

1. Description, theory and explanation in phonology Sharon Hargus University of Washington

2. Thanks to • Kristina Stolte of Thomson Higher Education for the loan of 30 clickers for today’s colloquium

3. Organization of talk • Role of language description in linguistics • Explanation in phonology • What is a linguistic theory? • An evaluation of Optimality Theory

4. A question about Newmeyer Mar 06 colloquium. What was Fritz’s answer to the question he is frequently asked: Why are there so many theories of syntax? • The data underdetermine the theory. • Linguists are not smart enough to figure out why. • He didn’t have an answer. • No one syntactician understands all the facts. • (I don’t remember or I wasn’t there.)

5. Description

6. Traditional goals of Boasian research program • Pioneering work of Boas • descriptions of W. Greenlandic Eskimo, Kwakiutl • race  culture  language • Linguistics a branch of anthropology at that time Franz Boas, 1858-1942, anthropologist

7. Boasian goals for description of a language • Texts • Grammar • Dictionary • Grammar: linguists’ deductions about the rule system used by speakers (and signers) • Texts: examples of the language as actually used • Audio and/or video recordings, transcribed and translated • Dictionary: provides depth for the description; source data for deduced grammar • Boas extremely influential, had many students

8. Who was Melville Jacobs? • UW anthropologist • Philanthropist who donated much $ to UW for descriptive linguistic research • One of Boas’s teachers at Columbia • One of the neogrammarians, a contemporary of Boas in Germany • I don’t know.

9. Melville Jacobs • Faculty member at UW (Anthropology) 1928-71 • A Sketch of Northern Sahaptin Grammar (1931) was his Columbia U. PhD dissertation (directed by Boas) • Also studied Chinook Jargon, and ‘many now-extinct western Oregon languages’ (Seaburg and Amoss 200:8)

10. Jacobs and his wife Bess ‘had originally determined to leave their estate to the Anthropology Department at the University of Washington, but Jacobs’s growing disenchantment with the direction of scholarship in the department led him to look for an alternative venue.’(Seaburg and Amoss: 10) • clash with dept chair Erna Gunther • received poor evaluations from students (student evals instituted 1929) and chair • nearly got the axe during exigent times during the depression • decreasing interest in Native American studies by colleagues • subpoenaed to appear before Canwell Commission; disciplined by UW Committee on Tenure and Academic Freedom for Communist Party membership (had joined around 1935)

11. Established Jacobs Research Fund (for anthropological and linguistic research on NW Native American groups), administered by Whatcom Museum of History and Art in Bellingham (fund also augmented by bequests from Jacobs’ mother-in-law and the late Dale Kinkade, UBC)

12. Fang-Kuei Li • 1902-1987 • Faculty member at UW, 1949-1969 (Asian L&L); then to U. Hawaii • Student of Sapir and Bloomfield at Chicago • Foundational work in Athabaskan linguistics (Krauss 2005, Scollon and Scollon 1989) • MA thesis: “do what you can with these” (Sapir’s 1926 Sarcee field notes) • PhD dissertation: Mattole grammar • also fieldwork on Chipewyan, Hupa, Wailaki, Eyak • Distinguished scholar in 3 language families (Athabaskan-Eyak, Chinese, Tai) • including much harrowing fieldwork in China during WWII

13. Descriptive linguistics and diversity • ‘Linguistic diversity is important to the discipline of linguistics because the central focus of the field is to understand the human capacity for language. Thus, linguistic scholarship benefits from inquiry into a range of families and types of human languages, used in a range of settings.’(Draft: Summary of Diversity Plan for Recruitment and Retention of Underrepresented Minorities. Emily Bender and Alicia Beckford Wassink)

14. What did Chomsky (1965) mean by ‘descriptively adequate grammar’? • A reasonably complete, detailed grammar. • A grammar that reflects native speaker competence. • A grammar that does not contain faulty transcriptions. • I don’t know. • I don’t remember.

15. Descriptive adequacy • Chomsky 1965:24: ‘a grammar can be regarded as a theory of a language; it is descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker. The structural descriptions assigned to sentences by the grammar, the distinctions that it makes between well-formed and deviant, and so on, must, for descriptive adequacy, correspond to the linguistic intuition of the native speaker…’

16. Description and descriptive adequacy • Thus the syntactic (or morphological) component of a grammar is insufficient if it simply lists well-formed sentences (or words). • A descriptively adequate phonology would distinguish between possible but non-occurring vs. impossible sound patterns.

17. What role would lexicography or texts play in the Chomsky 65 vision of descriptive linguistics? • Texts • a useful starting point for observations about syntax • Dictionary • a useful starting point to find phonological patterns • enables cross-linguistic studies such as Rozelle 2003

18. Role of language description in phonology • Yawelmani (Yokuts) (especially Newman 1944. see Silverstein 1987) • Klamath (Barker 1963a,b, 1964)

19. Importance of Yawelmani • Intricate phonological system • Rounding harmony, vowel length alternations, epenthesis and deletion, underlying vs. derived vowel qualities • Yawelmani a case study in many introductory generative phonology textbooks (e.g. Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1979, Kenstowicz 1994, Odden 2005); even a mention in Kager 1999 • Syllable and moraic structure (Archangeli 1991) • Templatic morphological system imposed by certain affixes • rare type in spoken languages outside of Semitic (Archangeli 1988) • Ejective vs. glottalized sonorant timing patterns (Plauché 1998)

20. Importance of Klamath • Intricate glide/vowel alternations (Clements and Keyser 1983) • Syllable structure (Levin 1985) • Reduplication types (McCarthy and Prince 1995) • Lateral debuccalization, with implications for feature organization (Clements 1985)

21. Descriptive vs. documentary linguistics • Himmelmann 1998 proposal. Descriptive linguistics consists of • documentation (collection, transcription, translation) • analysis • Nonetheless, many use these terms interchangeably (euphemism?) • Descriptive linguistics • Documentary linguistics • Primary linguistics (< Emmon Bach)

22. Currently great interest in description • In contrast to my days as a grad student (79-85) when only phoneticians, SSILA type linguists were interested in description • SSILA = Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, founded 1982 • Symptoms of a change in the field • Publication of Hale et al. 1992 (Language) • LSA Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation established 1992

23. Why the interest? • Descriptive/documentary linguistics is ‘hard work under trying conditions’ Seaburg and Amoss:3 • Methodologically, descriptive linguistics is quite straightforward. • There is always some result.

24. Descriptive linguistics as a type of basic research • Solving empirical problems has been an honorable pursuit for many other fields of inquiry • Cf. mapping the human genome • ‘The research is the latest fruit of the Human Genome Initiative, which transcribed and read out the entire genetic message of human chromosomes, completed in 2003… “We were never able to look at things like this before.”’ (‘Chimp-human split fuzzy?’ The Seattle Times. 5-18-06.)

25. Basic research can lead to unexpected benefits • Hargus 2005 reported on effects of final glottalization ([?], [n’]) on voice quality in Witsuwit’en • Sample of 8 speakers • Pitch lowerers: HM, LM, MA, MF • Pitch raisers: AJ, KN, (SM) • Mixed: BM

27. Why this result is interesting • Variable reflexes of final glottalization in Proto-Athabaskan (Leer 87); e.g. *tSha ‘beaver’ • Tsek’ene tshà? • Slave tshá? • Ahtna tsha? • Witsuwit’en confirms phonetic predictions of Kingston 2005 (glottalization can have both raising and lowering effects) • Phonetic effect  phonology (Hayes 1999 shows how)

28. Explanation

29. What did Chomsky 65 mean by explanatory adequacy as a measure of grammars? • All things equal, prefer a grammar that makes sense. • All things equal, prefer a grammar that explains why its grammatical statements have the form they do. • All things equal, prefer a grammar that could be learned as an L1. • I don’t know/don’t remember.

30. ‘The problem of…explanatory adequacy…is essentially the problem of constructing a theory of language acquisition, an account of the specific innate abilities that make this achievement possible.’ Now usually known as ‘the learnability problem’.

31. Phonological concern with explanation • A sample explanation in phonology (search any article for ‘explain, explanat-, account, why’ etc.) • e.g. Piggott 2003. Malay nasal harmony [mãyãn] ‘stalk’ [mewãh] ‘be luxurious’ [mã?ãp] ‘pardon’ [mlaran] ‘forbid’ [mãkan] ‘eat’ Piggott’s observation: in languages with nasal harmony, ‘voiceless obstruent stops are always among the neutral [non-nasalizable] segments’ (p. 376)

32. ‘To explain why obstruent stops are invariably neutral to nasal harmony, phonological theory must impose two requirements on grammars: (a) MaxStopDist must be present in every nasal harmony system; (b) this constraint must always outrank NasHarm.’ (pp. 400-401) • MaxStopDist  constraint against deleting or changing stops

33. Other views on explanation in phonology • Ohala (1990, 1997): the only true explanations for sound patterns lie in phonetics. Purely phonological explanations for sound patterns are fraught with various problems, among which are • circularity: e.g. phonological features are binary because they are binary, language X has no diphthongs because *Diph is high ranking • projection: ‘the knowledge the linguist has about …is projected onto the mental grammar of linguistically-naïve native speakers’ • myopia: ‘neglecting data from multiple sources’

34. Steriade 1999 • Licensing by cue: ‘the main factor involved in neutralization and licensing is the distribution of cues to the relevant contrasts’ • Licensing by prosody (the status quo): ‘the distribution of features in general – and of laryngeal features in particular – is controlled by their prosodic position’ • ‘...syllable structure does not begin to describe, let alone explain, the patterns of laryngeal neutralization.’ (p. 16)

35. Licensing by Cue as an explanation • ‘This line of analysis promises to explain the grammar of neutralization, by showing how independently known facts about the perception and production of speech interact with grammatical conditions to yield sound pattern.’ (p. 2)

36. Blevins 2004 also embraces an Ohala-style approach to explanation in phonology, particularly historical phonology • See also Hume and Johnson (eds.) 2001; Hayes, Kirchner and Steriade (eds.) 2004

37. But can everything phonological be explained? • ‘Of course, phonological grammars may turn out to be structured in ways that are arbitrary or unexpected from the standpoint of speech perception.’ (Steriade 1999:22) • Anderson 1981 • See also Howe and Pulleyblank 2002

38. Theory

39. What is a linguistic theory? • Is a theory an explanation? no • Is a theory a framework for description? yes • Is a theory a model of some phenomenon? yes • What makes one theory better than another?

40. Comparing theories • Simplicity criterion • Kenstowicz 1994:94: analyses are judged by ‘the overall simplicity of the rules and representations of the grammar’ • Hayes 1999: simplicity is a driving force in phonology • Explanatory adequacy/learnability

41. Chomsky 1965 • ‘a linguistic theory is descriptively adequate if it makes a descriptively adequate grammar available for each natural language’ (p. 24) • ‘To the extent that a linguistic theory succeeds in selecting a descriptively adequate grammar on the basis of primary linguistic data [data that a child is exposed to], we can say that it meets the condition of explanatory adequacy. That is, to this extent, it offers an explanation for the intuition of the native speaker on the basis of an empirical hypothesis concerning the innate predisposition of the child to develop a certain kind of theory to deal with the evidence presented to him.’ (pp. 25-26)

42. Optimality Theory

43. Optimality Theory • In what respects is OT an advance over previous theories? • OT officially released in 1993 • Prince and Smolensky 1993 (now published, Prince and Smolensky 2004) • McCarthy and Prince 1993

44. Previous standard theory of phonology • Epitomized by Kenstowicz 1994, Archangeli and Pulleyblank 1994 Classical generative phonology: rules apply serially: /underlying representation/ [derived representation] rule 1 (applies to UR) [derived representation] rule 2 (applies to the output of rule 1) [phonetic form] • Generative phonology had evolved to a mixture of rules and constraints • e.g. ATR/HI Condition (AP 94:176): If [+ATR] then [+hi].

45. OT in a nutshell • /Input or underlying representation/ •  (GEN) • {[rep1] [rep2] … } (Set of possible phonetic representations.) • The set of candidate forms is infinite. • The alterations to the input representation performed by GEN are phonological operations such as epenthesis, deletion, assimilation, etc.

46. EVAL: Eval(uate) is a function which evaluates and ranks the members of the candidate set generated by GEN for phonological well-formedness. EVAL draws on primarily three types of phonological constraints: markedness, faithfulness, and alignment.

47. Successes of Optimality Theory • Success as measured by simplicity criterion • Top-down parsing • Over-application and under-application • Incorporation of perceptually based constraints

48. Top-down parsing • Tongan

49. Previous derivational account • Analysis of Poser 1985: (1) initial syllabification: syllabify VV as V.V everywhere, (2) construct feet, (3) final syllabification: coalesce V.V into VV. unless members of different feet • Prince and Smolensky criticism: this analysis requires an intermediate stage with massive unusual syllabification (V.V everywhere).

50. Top-down parsing • In Tongan, feet are built from the top of the grid down) (position line 2 asterisk as close to the right edge as possible), rather than having feet built up from syllable boundaries (from the bottom of the grid up)