<OT> New Posting: ROA-730

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 730-0405

Some listener-oriented accounts of hache aspire in French

Paul Boersma <paul.boersma at uva.nl>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=730


Abstract:
This article shows that the usual speaker-based account
of h-aspire in French can explain at most three of the four
phonological processes in which it is involved, whereas
a listener-oriented account can explain all of them. On
a descriptive level, the behaviour of h-aspire is accounted
for with a grammar model that involves a 'control loop',
whose crucial ingredient is 'listener-oriented faithfulness
constraints'. These constraints evaluate phonological recoverabil
ity, which is the extent to which the speaker thinks the
listener will be able to recover the phonological message.
On a more reductionist level, however, the pronunciation
of h-aspire and its variation is accounted for with a new,
very simple, grammar model that can be called 'phonology
and phonetics in parallel'. This model uses a single constraint
set for all four processes involved in bidirectional three-level
phonology, namely perception, recognition, phonological
production, and phonetic implementation. In this model,
the phenomenon of phonological recoverability is not built
in, as in control-loop grammars, but emerges from the interaction
of four equally simple learning algorithms.

Comments: 
Keywords: parallelism, French, liaison, elision, enchainment, control loop
Areas: Phonology,Phonetics,Learnability
Type: Journal Article

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=730