Re: THEORY: phonemics (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum

John Cowan <jcowan@...> wrote:

>And Rosta scripsit:
>
>> > >But that still leaves us with
>> > >allophonic variation that is not conditioned positionally, which
>> > >is why I gave the example of English /t/ in foot-internal
>> > >intervocalic position, which can, inter alia, be [t] or tap [D].
>
>On reflection, I don't understand this one at all.  For me, [t] vs
>flap is completely positional, and I thought the dialects for which
>this is not so don't have flap at all.
>
>> I deliberately chose the [t]/[D] allophony because it can't be
>> defined by underspecification: whereas the final /p/ allophony can be
>> defined by not specifying relase or aspiration, the intervocalic /t/
>> allophony can be defined only extensionally, as the list {[t], [D]}.
>
>They are both alveolars, though, and the idea of a category that
>unites stop and flap (which can be thought of as a stop of minimal
>length) is not absurd.
I also considered this.  In addition, it might be argued that
the style and register that And mentioned that result in an
allophony truly defined by extension are actually signifying two
different languages, and thus it might actually be possible to
define allophony by underspecification after all.  I didn't
initially push this because it seems to rely a bit too much on
hairsplitting.  Moreover, in order to confirm the idea of
universal underspecified allophony, it seems to me that a broad
and very detailed survey of languages would need to be undertaken,
and all that would be required to disprove the whole idea is one
counterexample.  I did not want to claim that such a counterexample
does not exist, thus my conservative demeanor.  Also, an arguably
bigger problem is explaining why it is that a speaker who does
not use the aforementioned styles and registers might have little
difficulty *hearing* the allophones.  That leads me to my main
point.

For what it's worth, it just dawned on me that there might well
be two ways to define a phoneme: productively and perceptually.
The productive definition of phoneme would entail the normal
allophones used when uttering the phoneme; the perceptual
definition would define the allophones that will be heard
by the same speaker or speech community as belonging to a phoneme.
The productive set will always be a subset of the perceptual set.
For example, I basically never will render intervocalic /t/ as [?],
but that presents no difficulty for me in hearing [?] as /t/ in
that position.  If we accept the broader perceptual definition
of phoneme as being basic, then the stance that in some cases
allophony can be defined only extensionally seems a bit stronger.


Regards

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