The Phonemic Principle Revisited

Transcription

1 US-China Education Review A, ISSN X October 2013, Vol. 3, No. 10, D DAVID PUBLISHING The Phonemic Principle Revisited Iftikhar Haider University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, USA This paper discusses and highlights the contribution of Morris Swadesh in the field of Linguistics in general and to the study of phoneme in particular. Swadesh s phonemic principles played an important role in the development of Linguistics as an independent field of study. Phonemic analysis is one of those questions in the field of Linguistics that will be studied repeatedly, and Swadesh s observations and analyses in the context of current phonological theory remain relevant to this day. Most of his ideas are still used with different terminology, e.g., minimal pairs, allophones, broad transcription, narrow transcription, etc.. His methods remained under discussion for many years after his seminal paper on phonemic analysis titled The Phonemic Principle was published. Despite of its many strengths, there are number of small weaknesses which are also discussed in this paper. Keywords: phoneme, phonemic analysis, allophones, defective phoneme, phonetic writing Introduction Swadesh was a leader in the first generation to develop modern linguistic analysis in the United States the generation that came to the analysis of linguistic structure as something with a distinct methodology to be developed and learned. (Hymes, 1971, p. 276) Linguists have long been interested in analyzing the sound structure of languages. Numerous linguists have tried to study sound structure by studying how the segmental phonemes of a language should be analyzed. Morris Swadesh ( ), one of the linguists interested in sound structure, laid the foundations for further work on phonemic analysis by completing his first theoretical work on inductive procedures for dividing sounds into meaningful sub-stretches. He presented a set of principles in his paper The Phonemic Principle. These principles assist the phonological analysis of phonemes on the basis of the positional variation of sounds in a given language. Swadesh s principles (Swadesh, 1934) played an important role in the development of Linguistics as an independent field of study. Some linguists, including Harris (1960), used Swadesh s principles for word and sound elements, and laid the foundations of discovery procedure based on distributional analysis, a procedure that is an important part of modern linguistic methodology (Strazny, 2012). Haugen (1958) stated Swadesh published The Phonemic Principle, which became fundamental to American work in this field (p. 498). In his paper, the author argued that phonologists can use a set of principles to discover phonemes on the basis of the distribution of sounds in a given language. He further asserted that different positional sound variants exist in complementary distribution in different languages, and these variants should be considered as instances of the same sound type or phoneme. In this paper, the author will highlight the basic ideas and the evidence he uses to strengthen his claims. In the last part, the author will present his views about this paper and reflect on the relevance of Swadesh s observations and analyses in the context of modern phonological theory. Iftikhar Haider, Ph.D. candidate, Applied Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

2 THE PHONEMIC PRINCIPLE REVISITED 785 Characteristics of Phonemes and Phonemic Categorization The first part of the paper gives a brief introduction of the phoneme and the phonemic principle. Swadesh (1934) contended that all languages have a limited number of speech sounds (phonemes), and all sounds are produced by using phonemes, which may be significant in a given language. Phonemes are significant as they can be used to differentiate words from each other. He further asserted that phonemes are precepts for native speakers of a language, who hear language via phonetic substance of phonemes. This shows that Swadesh believes in the psychological reality of phonemes. However, knowing the phonemes of one language does not help people learn another language. Even linguists have a difficult time discovering phonemes of languages other than those of their native language. Swadesh asserted that it is difficult to learn phonemes in other languages on the basis of one s native language knowledge. Replacing the phonemes of any language with the phonemes of even same language, results in words that are unintelligible to native speakers of that language. For example, hid, bed, or bit. Phonemes are also limited to the position in which they can occur; this positional limitation is found in many languages, including English. Such situations can give rise to word variants in different languages. Swadesh (1934) discussed these word variants in the next part of his paper. Swadesh (1934) categorized these variants within a single phoneme (allophones) into two sub-types, free and conditional variants. He stated that free variants are determined regardless of their position in sentences; however, conditional variants are determined by their position in a sentence. Free variants can be further categorized into particular free variants (applicable only to a single word or a restricted number of isolated words) and general free variants (applicable to all words in a given class). Similarly, conditional variants can also be divided into two sub-branches, particular and general conditional variants. Conditional variants can be further divided into phonetically- and structurally- conditioned cases. Swadesh discussed all these phoneme variants in 1934; today, these concepts are considered as the basic principles of phonemic analysis. One of his ground-breaking contributions was to help linguists identify phonemes on the basis of the distribution of sounds in a given language. He gave an example from English language by using /p/ sounds in words, such as Peter, piper, dip, sip, pit, and so on. Swadesh (1934) considered phoneme to be identifiable by phonetic type (later in his paper, he related it with phonetic norm) as given in some examples below. This shows that every time language users utter a phoneme, they follow a certain norm based on the occurrence of phonemes in different positions in a word. All these norms depend upon the phonetic environment in which phonemes occur. There can be multiple norms for one phoneme; in the case of the English letter p, there can be at least three norms: (1) Relatively fortis, aspirated, e.g., in the initial position, as in pit ; (2) Fortis unaspirated, e.g., between two vowels, as in upper ; (3) Lenis unaspirated, e.g., after s, as in spill. Swadesh noted that these linguistic norms and their range of deviations are often witnessed in individual language users. These different norms give rise to different surface forms of the same phoneme, commonly known as allophones. For example, in English, the phoneme /t/ has different allophones, i.e., the voiceless unaspirated /t/ in mistake, stop, etc., the aspirated /t/ in top, pretend, etc.; flapped [ɾ] in later, party, etc., glottalized and unreleased [ʔ] in the American pronunciation of hat, Atlantic, etc., the palatal affricate /ʧ/ (it is not fully an affricate but usually there is an palatal, fricated release to the /t/) in tree, betray, etc..

3 786 THE PHONEMIC PRINCIPLE REVISITED Current phonological analysis also places much emphasis on rules and representations of different phonemic features in a language. Phonemic Frequency and Defective Phoneme According to Swadesh (1934), phonemes often vary in their frequency in different languages. Some phonemes are frequent, e.g., the /s/ in English, and some are infrequent, e.g., the /g/ in Tunica only occurs in the stem gatci (mother). There can be certain other positional restrictions on phonemes in different languages, e.g., English words do not begin with two stops, whereas, this is possible in Sahaptin, e.g., tkwalwipt (evening meal). This demonstrates that each phoneme has a range of distributions; some phonemes are much more limited in certain positions as compared to some other phonemes in the same language, e.g., in English, /ŋ/ never occurs at the beginning of words. Phonemes with restricted positional distribution are called defective phonemes, which can be useful to finding out certain constraints in a given language. This concept is extremely helpful while collecting phonological data from informants. Linguists often use this technique in field methods by introducing certain constraints to informants. On the basis of these generalizations, e.g., /ŋ/ restriction at the beginning of the English words, informants can easily discern whether this defective phoneme is possible in their language. The above-mentioned Swadesh s concept of defective phoneme helps save a lot of time for language researchers, as it helps them predict if a form is possible in their target language or not. Sometimes, informants can present counterexamples of certain restrictions, which may decrease time spent searching for counterexamples from other sources, such as dictionaries. This approach is still followed by some language researchers working on identification of phonological sound patterns. On the basis of common phonetic, variational, and distributional features, all sounds of a language can be divided into different classes. These classes can be further sub- and cross- classified if they share many similarities of these three features. For example, /p/, /t/, and /k/ are different from all other English phonemes on the basis of their common phonetic, variational, and distributional features. Swadesh (1934) asserted that due to the correlation of their significant features, phonemes are likely to occur in a consistent pattern. He added that in addition to these features, phonemes are classified with regards to their psychologically separable synchronous features (p. 121), which include tone, prosody, and stress. These features can give rise to three basic kinds of phonemes: (1) Sentence phonemes based on patterns of sentence prosody; (2) Syllable phonemes based on tonemes (phonemes of tone in tone languages) and tasemes (phonemes of stress in stress languages); (3) Self-contained phonemes that are proper phonemes. (p. 122) The occurrence of these three types of phonemes varies from language to language. Swadesh (1934) stated that all languages have self-contained phonemes, but they appear to vary for sentence and syllable phonemes. For example, English contains all these three types; French has sentence and self-contained; Navaho has syllable and self-contained; and Nitinat has only self-contained phonemes. Later research on phoneme has proved that most languages have sentence prosody, but the description and analysis of sentence prosody were not developed when swadesh wrote on phoneme. Swadesh s categorization of phonemes on the basis of different features is still useful for today s linguistic research. At initial stages of investigations, or in certain situations if complete access to data of a language is not possible, these categorizations can be a useful tool for

4 THE PHONEMIC PRINCIPLE REVISITED 787 comparing different languages. Similarly, Swadesh claimed that each language has a specific word and syllabic structure (Swadesh, 1934, p. 122). The occurrence of phonemes in certain phonetic environments directly relates to word structure. For example, in Chitimacha all words begin with a single consonant followed by a vowel. In Nootka, a monosyllabic word never ends in a short vowel. All languages have such rules based on word structure. Here, he did not give examples of sentence phonemes to prove his claim; this article would have been more persuasive if the author had given examples of all new categories of phonemes he introduced. Swadesh s Inductive Method In the method part of his article, Swadesh put forward the idea of the phonemic principle and asserted that the inductive procedure is the only way through which the phonemes of a language can be discovered (Swadesh, 1934, p. 123). He also discussed some important details of the inductive process and cautions that these details only apply to a particular language. This process of discovering the phonemes of a language should start with phonetic facts and should follow certain criteria. Here, he discussed his five criteria: consistency of words, partial identities, constant association, complementary distribution, pattern congruity, and his test of substitution. Swadesh (1934) stated that one must discover a consistent pattern of each word because same words have similar phonemic structure. This approach can help with finding a consistent representation of each word, as well as depict a range of deviation according to differences in the pronunciation of the same word. Once, a consistent pattern is identified, linguists can look for the significant elemental sound types by thoroughly comparing all sets of words with similar phonetic segmentation. This process can help formulate partial identities among these sets. This criterion of partial identities can only be applied if phonemes involved in a given phonetic element constitute a phonemic class based on the significant elemental sound types (Swadesh, 1934, p. 123). Swadesh (1934) argued that if sets of phonetic properties occur together they may then be treated as units in constant association. These ideas are closely related to Gleason s (1961) definition of phoneme, namely, a class of sound which is phonetically similar and shows certain characteristic patterns of distribution in the language or dialect under consideration (p. 261). For example, in English, when native speakers produce words containing the phoneme /p/, they have slightly different variations in different phonetic environments, e.g., wept, spill, and pan. Swadesh (1934) called this variation the range of deviation of the component phonemes (p. 123). He also stated, on grounds of phonetic similarity, that two or more phonetic segments can be subtypes of the same phoneme, provided that they are also in complementary distribution. For the next criterion of pattern congruity, Swadesh (1934) asserted that in order to enhance pattern congruity, phonemes can be organized into a system that can be frequently used throughout the phonemic study of a language. Finally, in his test of substitution, he argued that one phoneme can be substituted by another if it results in an extreme distortion from the norm, i.e., it produces a new unintelligible word for native speakers of a given language. Swadesh (1934) concluded this section of method by declaring discovering phonemes is the first step in the phonemic study of a language (p. 124). Even though Swadesh stated his principles 80 years ago, he was correct in his conclusions. Even today, identification of phonemes of a given language is a major task for linguists studying or comparing different languages. In graduate-level phonology courses, graduate students do different exercises to identify phonemes of a given language. First of all, they look for minimal pairs, which are closely related to Swadesh s test of

5 788 THE PHONEMIC PRINCIPLE REVISITED substitution. This test helps us confirm whether substituting one sound for another results in a different word. If this holds for this condition then we confirm that two sounds represent different phonemes. Minimal pairs are also used as a pedagogical tool for ESL/EFL (English as a second language/english as a foreign language) pronunciation classes. The author believes that it would have been better if Swadesh had used some specific term for minimal pairs while explaining his test of substitution, but this term was not introduced at that point of time. However, the author highlighted how important it is to study the total phonemic system of a language in order to find out its significant classes, sub-classes, and cross-classes. This was a great contribution, as phonologists are often confronted with the challenge of determining whether certain sounds fall into classes, sub-classes, or cross-classes. Phonemic Orthography Swadesh (1934) considered phonemic orthography as an adequate, economical, and effective tool for writing a language. Phonemes of a language can be perceived of as having some relationship to orthography, and the author of this article considers orthography as an important tool for representing sounds of a language. For example, English orthography is often considered arbitrary, yet, its regularity outweighs it arbitrariness. Many teachers of pronunciation seek help from English orthography to formulate and explain prediction rules related to English stress patterns. Swadesh (1934) stated that economical phonemic writing uses a few simple signs so that even a language user who does not know the meaning of the words still can pronounce them easily. This can be done if phonemic symbols depict the signs for different classes of phonemes. However, he also mentioned that such orthography can be impractical for some reasons, which are not mentioned in this paper. It would have been better if the author had discussed some of those reasons briefly in his paper. Concluding this section, Swadesh favored using the same phonemic symbols for all languages. Without this, the use of different phonemic symbols for each language would make phonological analysis complicated. Swadesh was a great supporter of phonemic orthography, as he discussed merits and demerits of phonetic orthography. He highlighted the role of phonetics in the discovery and description of phonemes. However, once this discovery and description takes place, linguists should replace phonetic alphabets with a consistent, thorough, and simplified phonemic orthography. Swadesh shared his views with Bloomfield s (1933) critiques of phonetic methods. Swadesh quoted Bloomfield s paper to support his claims. In this paper, Bloomfield criticized the phonetic method by doubting the validity of personal equipment used by phoneticians and suggested that it did not accurately capture all acoustic features. This quotation gives the impression that Bloomfield rejected the theoretical contribution of phonetics in the field of Linguistics at that time. However, today, acoustic phonetics has become the cutting edge research field in Linguistics in addition to some other scientific disciplines. There have been amazing accomplishments in digital signal processing since the Bloomfield s time. All these advances enable more reliable and informative acoustic analysis to nullify Bloomfield s criticism of phonetics. Swadesh (1934) also criticized phonetic writing by enumerating some of its drawbacks. Here, he claimed that phonemic orthography can record all the pertinent phonetic facts and gave four major drawbacks of phonetic writing: (1) Phonetic writing does not indicate significant phonetic units of a given language; (2) Phonetic writing is overly microscopic, complex, and hard to handle; (3) Phonetic writing does not distinguish errors and distortions from normal forms; (4) Phonetic writing is likely to be phonetically inaccurate. (p. 127)

6 THE PHONEMIC PRINCIPLE REVISITED 789 The point that Swadesh wanted to make by introducing these drawbacks of phonetic writing is that phoneticians need to improve their methods of discrimination of acoustic features; otherwise, they may easily overlook some of the important sound features in a given language. Because of the above-mentioned drawbacks of phonetic writing, Swadesh (1934) thought that phonemic orthography is a better option to use working on the sound features of a language. It seems that he overlooked the importance of phonetic orthography as it also has its own importance if we consider the role of phonetics in showing allophones and some other aspects of sounds in a language. However, he acknowledged that normative phonetic orthography offers the same advantages found in phonemic writing if such interpretations are made carefully. IPA (International Phonetic Association) transcription is an excellent example of normative phonetic orthography in modern phonological analyses. Swadesh concluded his paper with a brief discussion on historical phonology and morpho-phonology. He argued that in phonemic analysis, only phonetic data are important, and that historical phonology is not relevant. Swadesh (1934) defined morpho-phonology as the study of interchange between phonemes as a morphologic process (p. 128). He further claimed that there can be morphologically distinct phonemes in a given language. Such phonemes can be labeled as morpho-phonemes, a distinct class, as in some other classes of phonemes (Swadesh, 1934). This section of Swadesh s paper is somewhat detached from the rest of the paper. For the most part of the last sections of his paper does not make a strong connection with the remainder of the paper. It would have been better if Swadesh integrated this part coherently in the main arguments of his paper. This detachment is quite obvious for readers, as it is difficult to connect this part with previous sections of his paper. Keeping in mind that this paper was written eighty years ago, this detachment may not be valid critique at that time. However, Swadesh tried to create a connection between historical phonology and morpho-phonology in the concluding paragraph of his paper by stating Phonemics interrelates with other phases of linguistics science, but does not compete with other phases (Swadesh, 1934, p. 129). Swadesh s main argument here is that we can also study phonemes by viewing the phonemic structure of morphemes and observing how these morphological processes contribute to the phonemic interchange in a given language. Major Contribution of Swadesh s Phonemic Principle One of the major contributions of Swadesh s paper is the inductive method that it introduced for phonemic discovery and for their interpretation in a consistent way. His main argument is to follow a set of principles to discover phonemes on the basis of positional variation of sounds in a given language. His methodological explorations are criticized by few contemporary linguists; however, his contributions are still honored. Though, his discovery of inductive method is important, but on a second thought, it appears redundant as this method is the only possible way to discover phonemes. Another option is deductive method which is not applicable as in phonological analysis we usually move from language data to our conclusions about sound patterns and identification of phonemes. If the author do similar analysis today, even if he does not know anything about inductive method still first thing in phonemic analysis is to follow inductive procedures; in Descriptive Linguistics, we often follow inductive procedures even in Sociolinguistics. Linguists go to certain speech community, collect linguistic data from respondents, and then inductively draw their conclusions about their sociolinguistic behavior. However, Swadesh s contribution is praiseworthy if we remember that he had limited resources at the time of his research. Throughout the paper he cited data from different languages, e.g., Nootka, Chitimacha, Nitinat, Eskimo, etc., which shows he was adept at data collection. Swadesh believed in detailed

7 790 THE PHONEMIC PRINCIPLE REVISITED knowledge of language in order to make solid claims about its sound features. His methods remained under discussion for many years after his paper was published in Some of his principles were used by other phonologists, including Harris. Conclusions Swadesh s paper provides elegant and convincing principles for addressing one of the major concerns about establishing a consistent and concise inventory of phonemes for a given language. Even today, phonemes are one of the central concepts that are analyzed for different set of features and are studied by inductive method. According to Dresher (2011), many popular topics in present day phonological theory are related to some aspect of phoneme. He mentioned the following four topics to support his claim: distinctive features theory, feature organization, underspecification, markedness theory, and notion of contrast. There are still many useful claims in Swadesh s work, and linguists can return to The Phonemic Principle to re-evaluate his claims in light of modern phonemic analysis. Phonemic analysis is one of those questions in the field of Linguistics that will be studied repeatedly, and Swadesh s observations and analyses in the context of current phonological theory remain relevant to this day. Most of his ideas are still used in different terminology, e.g., minimal pairs, allophones, broad transcription, narrow transcription, etc.. Most of the things in this paper are true, and they are very basic if we compare it with advancements made in the field of phonology until today. Some of the notions are not clear to reader, e.g., sentence phoneme, since Swadesh did not give any examples of this concept. Classic phonemic analysis, as Swadesh proposed, is not compatible with contemporary phonological theory, since it disregards the challenge of determining contrastive relationships, and presupposes a strictly abstract lexicon. Current work calls attention to phenomena of quasi-contrast (Cole, 2012, personal communication), and exemplar models of the lexicon where phonetic detail and usage frequency can enter into the calculation of lexical contrast. In a nutshell, Swadesh has published an important published paper on the phonemic analysis. Despite of its many strengths, there are number of small weaknesses which can be ignored if we consider Swadesh s contribution in the modern phonology. Hymes (1971) appreciated Swadesh s contribution in these words: We shall not see another scholar like him, but we can hope and believe that the challenge and opportunity expressed in his life work will be fulfilled (p. 225). References Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language (Chaps. 5-8). New York: Henry Holt Press. Dresher, B. (2011). The phoneme. In M. V. Oostendorp, J. E. Colin, E. Hume, & K. Rice (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology (Vol. 1, pp ). Malden, M.A. & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gleason, A. (1961). An introduction to descriptive linguistics. New York: Rinehart and Winston. Hymes, D. (1971). Morris Swadesh: From the first Yale school to world prehistory. In M. Swadesh (Ed.), The origin and diversification of language. Chicago: Aldine Atherton. Harris, Z. (1960). Methods in structural linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haugen, E. (1958). Review of J. R. Firth, papers in linguistics, London: Oxford University Press. Swadesh, M. (1934). The phonemic principle. Language, 10(2), Strazny, W. (2012). Morris Swadesh: Critical essay. Retrieved July 29, 2012, from