Date: Wednesday 8 May 2024
Time: 12:00 - 13:00
Venue: GW256, Gateway Building, University of Malta, Msida and Online (via Zoom)
Title of talk: "Cross-linguistic evidence for a strong statistical universal: Phonological neutralisation targets word-ends over beginnings".
We report a statistical test of a long-standing hypothesis in the literature: that phonological neutralisation rules are more common at the ends of lexical domains than the beginnings (Houlihan 1975 et seq.).
We collected descriptive grammars for a really and genetically diverse set of fifty languages, identified all active phonological rules that target the edge of a lexical domain (root, stem, word, phrase, or utterance), and further coded each rule for whether it was phonemically neutralising, that is, able to create surface homophony.
We find that such neutralising rules are strongly, significantly less common at the beginnings of lexical domains relative to ends, and that this pattern is strikingly consistent across all languages within the data set. We show that this pattern is not an artefact of a tendency for syllable codas to be a target for phonological neutralisation, nor is it associated with a suffixing or prefixing preference.
Consistent with previous accounts, we argue that this pattern may ultimately be based in the greater average information content of phonological categories early in the word, which itself is a consequence of incremental processing in lexical access.
