The null-hypotheses of “syllable structure” |
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Péter Szigetvári (Budapest) |
Government
phonology is perhaps the best-known, though not the first, theory of
phonological representation to apply empty categories. The notion has evoked
copious criticism, primarily because of its unnaturalness. I criticize government
phonology not because it has empty categories but because it does not have
enough of them.
I will show that
_if_ we allow empty skeletal positions in our theory -- a move that both the
autosegmental model of phonological organization and the unary-feature model of
melodic representation (a logical conclusion of underspecification theory) make
feasible -- , the coda becomes superfluous, and syllable structure reduces to
strictly alternating C and V positions (cf. Lowenstamm 1996 and many following
studies). In effect, this means that syllable structure as such vanishes. A
very similar conclusion can be drawn by building up a model of syllable
structure proceeding from the simplest, CV-only inventories to more complex
systems. I will thus argue that there exist two null- hypotheses of syllable
structure: either skeletons faithfully represent superficial sound strings, or
skeletal positions may be empty, in which case CVCV skeletons are the
null-hypothesis. Standard government phonology (as discussed in Kaye & al.
1990 or Harris 1994) incorporates an unnecessary deviation by allowing onsets,
nuclei and rhymes to branch; in other words, it fails to draw the logical
conclusion of introducing empty categories into the phonological representation.
References
Harris, John. 1994.
English sound structure. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kaye, Jonathan,
Jean Lowenstamm and Jean-Roger Vergnaud. 1990. Constituent structure and
government in phonology. Phonology 7: 193--232.
Lowenstamm, Jean.
1996. CV as the only syllable type. In Jacques Durand and Bernard Laks (eds.),
Current trends in phonology: Models and methods. European Studies Research
Institute, University of Salford Publications. 419--442.