How much homophony is normal?1

This paper argues that neutralizing phonological alternations are sensitive to how much homophony they create among distinct lexical items: neutralizing rules create fewer homophones than expected. Building on a case study of Korean by Silverman (2010), I compare the neutralizing rules of Korean to a large number of hypothetical alternatives generated by Monte Carlo simulations. The simulations reveal that the actual rules of Korean frequently create far fewer homophones than similar (but unattested) rules, even when the rules that are compared are controlled for the number of phonemic contrasts they eliminate. These results suggest that phonological patterns are sensitive not only to high-level contrasts among phonemes but also to contrasts among individual lexical items. The effect is most pronounced when homophones are not weighted by frequency, a result that adds to evidence in the literature that the relevant measure of lexical frequency for many lexicon-sensitive phonological patterns is type frequency, not token frequency.

[1]  Sarah Ouwayda.  Contrast Preservation in dialects of North Levantine Arabic , 2010 .

[2]  D. Silverman.  Neutralization and anti-homophony in Korean1 , 2009, Journal of Linguistics.

[3]  Adam Albright,et al.  Feature-based generalisation as a source of gradient acceptability* , 2009, Phonology.

[4]  P. Smolensky,et al.  Listeners' knowledge of phonological universals: evidence from nasal clusters* , 2009, Phonology.

[5]  Juliette Blevins,et al.  An evolutionary approach to lexical competition , 2009 .

[6]  Stephen G. Parker,et al.  Phonological argumentation : essays on evidence and motivation , 2009 .

[7]  Jean-Francois Mondon,et al.  The Nature of Homophony and Its Effects on Diachrony and Synchrony. , 2009 .

[8]  Jaye Padgett,et al.  Systemic contrast and Catalan rhotics , 2009 .

[9]  A. Wedel,et al.  Lexical Access , Effective Contrast and Patterns in the Lexicon , 2009 .

[10]  Donca Steriade,et al.  The Phonology of Perceptibility Effects: The P-Map and Its Consequences for Constraint Organization , 2008 .

[11]  Paul Boersma,et al.  The evolution of auditory dispersion in bidirectional constraint grammars* , 2008, Phonology.

[12]  Junko Ito,et al.  The Phonological Lexicon , 2008 .

[13]  Adam Albright,et al.  Predicting innovative alternations in Korean verb paradigms , 2008 .

[14]  P. Smolensky,et al.  Analytic bias and phonological typology * , 2008 .

[15]  Máire Ní Chiosáin,et al.  Contrast, Comparison Sets, and the Perceptual Space , 2007 .

[16]  Judit Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza.  Minimal contrast and the phonology-phonetics interaction , 2007 .

[17]  Campos Astorkiza,et al.  Minimal contrast and the phonology -phonetics interaction , 2007 .

[18]  M. VanDam.  Plasticity of phonological categories , 2007 .

[19]  Andrew Martin,et al.  The evolving lexicon , 2007 .

[20]  Ole Nedergaard Thomsen.  Competing models of linguistic change : evolution and beyond , 2006 .

[21]  P. Niyogi,et al.  Quantifying the functional load of phonemic oppositions, distinctive features, and suprasegmentals , 2006 .

[22]  Larry K. Ichimura,et al.  Anti-Homophony Blocking and its Productivity in Transparadigmatic Relations , 2006 .

[23]  Marija Tabain,et al.  Adaptive Dispersion Theory and Phonological Vowel Reduction in Russian , 2005, Phonetica.

[24]  M. Kenstowicz.  Paradigmatic Uniformity and Contrast , 2004 .

[25]  Naomi Gurevich.  Lenition and Contrast: The Functional Consequences of Certain Phonetically Conditioned Sound Changes , 2004 .

[26]  Gunnar Ólafur Hansson,et al.  Anti-Homophony Effects in Dakelh (Carrier) Valence Morphology , 2004 .

[27]  Junko Ito,et al.  Morphological contrast and merger: ranuki in Japanese , 2004 .

[28]  John J. McCarthy,et al.  Optimality Theory in Phonology: A Reader , 2003 .

[29]  Andrew B Wedel,et al.  Self-organization and categorical behavior in phonology , 2003 .

[30]  R. Baayen,et al.  Predicting the Unpredictable: Interpreting Neutralized Segments in Dutch , 2003 .

[31]  Jaye Padgett,et al.  Contrast and Post-Velar Fronting in Russian , 2003 .

[32]  E. Moreton.  Structural constraints in the perception of English stop-sonorant clusters , 2002, Cognition.

[33]  Carlos Gussenhoven,et al.  Laboratory Phonology 7 , 2002 .

[34]  Edward Flemming,et al.  Auditory Representations in Phonology , 2002 .

[35]  Andrew Nevins,et al.  Phonological answers (and their corresponding questions) , 2002 .

[36]  Kazutaka Kurisu,et al.  The Phonology of Morpheme Realization , 2002 .

[37]  J. Pierrehumbert.  Why phonological constraints are so coarse-grained , 2001 .

[38]  Keith Johnson,et al.  The Role of Speech Perception in Phonology , 2001 .

[39]  Jennifer L. Smith.  Lexical Category and Phonological Contrast , 2001 .

[40]  Janet B. Pierrehumbert,et al.  Word-specific phonetics , 2001 .

[41]  Joe Pater.  Non-uniformity in English secondary stress: the role of ranked and lexically specific constraints , 2000, Phonology.

[42]  Ho-min Sohn.  The Korean language , 1999 .

[43]  T. Bever,et al.  Sensitivity to Phonological Universals in Children and Adolescents. , 1975 .

[44]  S. E. Martin,et al.  A Reference Grammar of Korean , 1975 .

[45]  Robert D. King,et al.  Functional Load and Sound Change , 1967 .

[46]  C. F. Hockett.  The Quantification of Functional Load , 1967 .

[47]  André Martinet,et al.  Function, Structure, and Sound Change , 1952 .