PHONOLOGY AND LANGUAGE USE. Joan Bybee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 237. $80.00 cloth, $32.00 paper. Bybee is concerned with providing an understanding of a vast amount of evidence from language use that remains unaccounted for in the usual models of generative phonology, including its currently popular descendant, Optimality Theory.

Phonology and language use

Syntax and speech

One hundred years on.

This paper examines the factors conditioning the production of linguistic variables in real time by individual speakers: the study of what we term the dynamics of variation in individuals. We propose a framework that recognizes three types of factors conditioning variation: sociostylistic (s-), internal linguistic (i-), and psychophysiological (p-). We develop two main points against this background. The first is that sequences of variants produced by individuals display systematic patterns that can be understood in terms of s-conditioning and p-conditioning (with a focus on the latter). The second main point is that p-conditioning and i-conditioning are distinct in their mental implementations; this claim has implications for understanding the locality of the factors conditioning alternations, for the universality and language-specificity of variation, and for the general question of whether grammar and language use are distinct. Throughout the paper, questions about the dynamics of variation in individuals are set against the typical community-centered variationist perspective, with an eye towards showing how findings in the two domains, though differing in explanatory focus, can ultimately be mutually informative.

/pdf/the-dynamics-of-variation-in-individuals-1t45zpp3x3.pdf

The dynamics of variation in individuals.

This volume is an up-to-date history of phonology from the earliest known examples of phonological thinking through the rise of phonology as a field in the 20th century and up to the present time. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I, Early insights in phonology, begins with writing systems and has chapters devoted to the great ancient and medieval intellectual traditions of phonological thought that form the foundation of later thinking and continue to enrich phonological theory. Part II, The founders of phonology, describes the important schools and individuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who shaped phonology as an organized scientific field. Part III takes up Mid-twentieth-century developments in phonology in the Soviet Union, Northern and Western Europe, and North America; it continues with precursors to generative grammar, and culminates in a chapter on Chomsky & Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English (SPE). Part IV, Phonology after SPE, shows how phonological theorists responded to SPE with respect to derivations, representations, and phonology-morphology interaction. Theories discussed include Dependency Phonology, Government Phonology, Constraint-and-Repair theories, and Optimality Theory. This part ends with a chapter on the study of variation. Part V, New methods and approaches, has chapters on phonetic explanation, corpora and phonological analysis, probabilistic phonology, computational modelling, models of phonological learning, and the evolution of phonology. This exploration of the history of phonology from various viewpoints provides new perspectives on where phonology has been and throws light on where it is going.

/pdf/the-oxford-history-of-phonology-18hswbi2.pdf

The Oxford History of Phonology

Many phonological processes can be affected by segmental context spanning word boundaries, which often lead to variable outcomes. This paper tests the idea that some of this variability can be explained by reference to production planning. We examine coronal stop deletion (CSD), a variable process conditioned by preceding and upcoming phonological context, in a corpus of spontaneous British English speech, as a means of investigating a number of variables associated with planning: Prosodic boundary strength, word frequency, conditional probability of the following word, and speech rate. From the perspective of production planning, (1) prosodic boundaries should affect deletion rate independently of following context; (2) given the locality of production planning, the effect of the following context should decrease at stronger prosodic boundaries; and (3) other factors affecting planning scope should modulate the effect of upcoming phonological material above and beyond the modulating effect of prosodic boundaries. We build a statistical model of CSD realization, using pause length as a quantitative proxy for boundary strength, and find support for these predictions. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that the locality of production planning constrains variability in speech production, and have practical implications for work on CSD and other variable processes.

/pdf/production-planning-and-coronal-stop-deletion-in-spontaneous-43zc7sfbxs.pdf

Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech.

A number of recent studies have observed that phonetic variability is constrained across speakers, where speakers exhibit limited variation in the signalling of phonological contrasts in spite of overall differences between speakers. This previous work focused predominantly on controlled laboratory speech and on contrasts in English and German, leaving unclear how such speaker variability is structured in spontaneous speech and in phonological contrasts that make substantial use of more than one acoustic cue. This study attempts to both address these empirical gaps and expand the empirical scope of research investigating structured variability by examining how speakers vary in the use of positive voice onset time and voicing during closure in marking the stop voicing contrast in Japanese spontaneous speech. Strong covarying relationships within each cue across speakers are observed, while between-cue relationships across speakers are much weaker, suggesting that structured variability is constrained by the language-specific phonetic implementation of linguistic contrasts.

/pdf/structured-speaker-variability-in-japanese-stops-4zng56no18.pdf

Structured speaker variability in Japanese stops: Relationships within versus across cues to stop voicing

Recent advances in access to spoken-language corpora and development of speech processing tools have made possible the performance of `large-scale' phonetic and sociolinguistic research. This study illustrates the usefulness of such a large-scale approach -- using data from multiple corpora across a range of English dialects, collected and analysed with the SPADE project -- to examine how the pre-consonantal Voicing Effect (longer vowels before voiced than voiceless obstruents, in e.g. \emph{bead} vs \emph{beat}) is realised in spontaneous speech, and varies across dialects and individual speakers. Compared with previous reports of controlled laboratory speech, the Voicing Effect was found to be substantially smaller in spontaneous speech, but still influenced by the expected range of phonetic factors. Dialects of English differed substantially from each other in the size of the Voicing Effect, whilst individual speakers varied little relative to their particular dialect. This study demonstrates the value of large-scale phonetic research as a means of developing our understanding of the structure of speech variability, and illustrates how large-scale studies, such as those carried out within SPADE, can be applied to other questions in phonetic and sociolinguistic research.

/pdf/toward-english-phonetics-variability-in-the-pre-consonantal-5e4dbhevnl.pdf

Toward "English" Phonetics: Variability in the Pre-consonantal Voicing Effect Across English Dialects and Speakers.

The ‘voicing effect’ – the durational difference in vowels preceding voiced and voiceless consonants – is a well-documented phenomenon in English, where it plays a key role in the production and perception of the English final voicing contrast. Despite this supposed importance, little is known as to how robust this effect is in spontaneous connected speech, which is itself subject to a range of linguistic factors. Similarly, little attention has focused on variability in the voicing effect across dialects of English, bar analysis of specific varieties. Our findings show that the voicing of the following consonant exhibits a weaker-than-expected effect in spontaneous speech, interacting with manner, vowel height, speech rate, and word frequency. English dialects appear to demonstrate a continuum of potential voicing effect sizes, where varieties with dialect-specific phonological rules exhibit the most extreme values. The results suggest that the voicing effect in English is both substantially weaker than previously assumed in spontaneous connected speech, and subject to a wide range of dialectal variability.

https://twpl.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/twpl/article/download/32769/25407

Vowel duration and the voicing effect across English dialects

Studies of speaker variability in the realisation of
stop voicing contrasts have demonstrated that differences across speakers are highly structured both
within and across phonetic categories. These studies
have focused on languages with similar voicing systems in scripted speech; it remains unclear how stop
realisation varies in spontaneous speech more generally. This study examines speaker variability in two
acoustic cues to stop voicing–Voice Onset Time and
Voicing During Closure–in a corpus of spontaneous
Japanese, a language undergoing change in its voicing contrast. Whilst speakers vary in both measures,
this variability is highly structured: speakers with
less aspirated stops are more likely to initiate voicing during the closure. However, no corresponding
relationship is observed between how the two cues
are used to mark the contrast. These findings extend previous work to demonstrate the structure of
speaker variability in spontaneous speech.

Structured Speaker Variability in Spontaneous Japanese Stop Contrast Production

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