Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Lusoga noun phrase tonology

Larry M. Hyman
2019

In this paper I present a detailed analysis of the tonology of nouns and their dependents within the noun phrase in Lusoga, a Bantu language of Uganda. After considering different alternatives, I argue that Lusoga is best analyzed with an underlying privative /L/ which derives from an earlier *H, realized directly in Luganda, the closest related language to Lusoga. To establish the basic system I start with infinitives (which are nouns), then analyze the different tone patterns on nouns of different sizes and shapes, with and without an augment, simple and reduplicated. I then turn...

Number and animacy in the Teke noun class system.

Larry M. Hyman
Florian A. J. Lionnet
Christophère Ngolele
2019

In this paper, we trace the development of Proto-Bantu noun classes into Teke (Bantu B71, Ewo dialect), showing that formal reflexes of classes 1, 2, 5–9, and 14 are detectable. We further show that animacy, abstractness, and number allow us to determine the fate of classes 3, 4, 10, 11 and identify the following singular/plural genders: 1/2 (animate <PB 1/2, some 9/10), 1/8 (inanimate, <PB 3/4), 14/8 (abstract, <PB 14/8), 5/6 (<PB 5/6), 5/9 (<PB 11/10, with 10>9 merger), 7/8 (<PB 7/8), and 9/6 (<PB 9/6). Such reassignments provide a window into probing...

Synchronic vs. diachronic naturalness: Hyman & Schuh (1974) revisited.

Larry M. Hyman
2019

In this paper I review and update the proposals in Hyman & Schuh (1974) distinguishing synchronic and diachronic naturalness in tone rules and tone changes.

The segmental and tonal structure of verb inflection in Babanki

Pius Akumbu
Larry M. Hyman
Roland Kiessling
2020

In this study we provide a comprehensive phonological and morphological analysis of the complex tense-aspect-mood (TAM) system of Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. Our emphasis is on the competing inflectional tonal melodies that are assigned to the verb stem. These melodies are determined not only by the multiple past and future tenses, perfective vs. progressive aspect, and indicative vs. imperative, subjunctive, and conditional moods, but also affirmative vs. negative and “conjoint” (CJ) vs. “disjoint” (DJ) verbal marking, which we show to be more thorough going...

Lung’Ie Word Prosody: One system or two?

Ana Lívia Agostinho
Larry M. Hyman
2021

Creole languages have generally not figured prominently in cross-linguistic studies of word-prosodic typology. In this paper, we present a phonological analysis of the prosodic system of Lung’Ie or Principense (ISO 639-3 code: pre), a Portuguese-lexifier creole language spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Lung’Ie has produced a unique result of the contact between the two different prosodic systems common in creolization: a stress-accent lexifier and tone language substrates. The language has a restrictive privative H/Ø tone system, in which the /H/ is culminative, but non-obligatory....

Phonological typology

Larry M. Hyman
Frans Plank
2018

Despite earlier work by Trubetzkoy, Jakobson and Greenberg, phonological typology is often underrepresented in typology textbooks. At the same time, most phonologists do not see a difference between phonological typology and cross-linguistic (formal) phonology. The purpose of this book is to bring together leading scholars to address the issue of phonological typology, both in terms of the unity and the diversity of phonological systems.

The conjoint/disjoint alternation in Bantu

Jenneke van der Wal
Larry M. Hyman
2017

This volume brings together descriptions and analyses of the conjoint/disjoint alternation, a typologically significant phenomenon found in many Bantu languages. The chapters provide in-depth documentation, comparative studies and theoretical analyses of the alternation from a range of Bantu languages, showing its crosslinguistic variation in constituent structure, morphology, prosody and information structure.

Post-nasal devoicing and the blurring process

Gašper Beguš
2019

This paper addresses one of the most contested issues in phonology: unnatural alternations. First, non-natural phonological processes are subdivided into unmotivated and unnatural. The central topic of the paper is an unnatural process: post-nasal devoicing (PND). I collect thirteen cases of PND and argue that in all reported cases, PND does not derive from a single unnatural sound change (as claimed in some individual accounts of the data), but rather from a combination of three sound changes, each of which is phonetically motivated. I present new evidence showing that the three stages...

Estimating historical probabilities of natural and unnatural processes

Gašper Beguš
2021

This paper presents a technique for estimating the influences of channel bias on phonological typology. The technique, based on statistical bootstrapping, enables the estimation of historical probability, the probability that a synchronic alternation arises based on two diachronic factors: the number of sound changes required for an alternation to arise and their respective probabilities. I estimate historical probabilities of six attested and unattested alternations targeting the feature [voice], compare historical probabilities of these alternations, perform inferential statistics...

Modeling unsupervised phonetic and phonological learning in Generative Adversarial Phonology

Gašper Beguš
2019

This paper models phonetic and phonological learning as a dependency between random space and generated speech data in the Generative Adversarial Neural network architecture and proposes a methodology to uncover the network’s internal representation that corresponds to phonetic and phonological features. A Generative Adversarial Network (Goodfellow et al. 2014; implemented as WaveGAN for acoustic data by Donahue et al. 2019) was trained on an allophonic distribution in English, where voiceless stops surface as aspirated word-initially before stressed vowels except if preceded by a sibilant...