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Normally silent phonemes | ||
Tags: Phonetics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Boeing Bilingual Pentaglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5204 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, Spanish, Corsican, Mandarin Studies: Greenlandic | Message 9 of 13 27 August 2010 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello folks,
It very much depends on your analysis. The final consonants you are describing (that seem to delete word- finally and then emerge in hiatus contexts) are often called floating consonants by theoretical phonologists (for treatment of these in French (cf. Charette 1991, Tranel 1995, Paradis 1995, Ulfsbjorninn 2007). What makes the French floating consonants particularly interesting is that French does allow word-final consonants, this raises these questions: Why doesn't the language just get rid of them? Why do these final consonants seem to delete word-finally? What happens to them? Now here comes the tenuous bit (this is untestable so far as I can figure out), some languages show behaviour that is quite similar to French floating consonants (but critically these languages ban all word final consonants). Take Samoan (Harris to appear) A olo + ia --> [oloia] 'rub' tau + ia --> &nbs p;[tauia] 'repay' aNa + ia --> [aNaia] 'face' B api + &n bsp;ia --> [apitia] 'be lodged' sopo + ia ; --> [sopo?ia] 'go across' milo + ia --> [milosia] 'twist' oso + ia --> [osofia] 'jump' asu + ia --> [asuNia] 'smoke' Nalo + ia --> [Nalomia] 'forget' So here in Samoan, you see that the same environment brings out the 'deleted' phoneme as we see in the French. The same sort of thing can be seen in other Polynesian languages including Maori. yours, Boeing 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 10 of 13 27 August 2010 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
It IS getting rid of them; just give it time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 13 27 August 2010 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | ||
So do you think it's a phoneme then? Does the learner's map have it as a single sound item? I theoretically understand the basic idea of mute phonemes, but I'm having problems working out what it means in practice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 13 27 August 2010 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, but that's phonetics. It's theorised that the phoneme that the written D represents in all three cases is a fixed item in the mental model, and when syntagm-final it's realised as //, when followed by the mute E it's /d/ and when in shifts to the start of the syllable in a following word it's /t/. One phoneme realised in three ways due to context. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5299 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 13 of 13 27 August 2010 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Every answer will largely depend on theoretic preconceptions, I am most familiar with the more or less generative framework and not familiar with any literature about this special problem, but for whatever it is worth (probably nothing), I think it is more a problem of morphology than of phonology. In other words: What is the rule for feminine adjectives? A plausible description of the mental process - as if we knew anything about it :-) - may be that there is a word "grand" in our lexicon, and in an actual sentence our grammar module tells us that we have to make a change because a feminine congruence is needed, grand is changed to grand+(something), that becomes our phonological representation, we apply the phonological rules of French, get the phonetic representation and can finally pronounce it. Where would we put the phoneme in such a model? Well, probably on the level of phonological representation. And what exactly is the phoneme sequence that stands for the necessary morphological change? There is more than one possibility. Orthography lets us think about |e|, (and diachronic observations may make this further plausible), but maybe it is just as adequate a description to call it a |0|, a place holder with the only function to take the new final position in the feminine form and to prevent the usual sound changes for word final positions. grand -> grand|0|, and now the d is no longer muted, because there is a new zero placeholder. The important concept for a learner to grasp is certainly just this opposition final vs not final, no matter what the exact form of the rule for feminine adjectives is. Is the phoneme/not phoneme now a never pronounced e-super-schwa, or a place holder zero phoneme, with effects on other sounds only? Anything else, as long as it describes the phonetic reality? I have no idea ... and sorry, I should have said it right from the start. Edited by lingoleng on 31 August 2010 at 10:39am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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