Cover not available

In:Beyond Markedness in Formal Phonology
Edited by Bridget D. Samuels
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 241] 2017
► pp. 153–190

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Chapter 7
Markedness and formalising phonological representations

 | University of Lyon | UCL – University of London
Published online: 16 November 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.241.07ulf
Abstract
As a linguistic concept, markedness is in trouble (Hale & Reiss 2000, 2008; Blevins 2004; Haspelmath 2006; Samuels 2011; Reiss 2017). Accepting many of these criticisms and conclusions, this chapter, nevertheless, claims that there is space for markedness in formal phonology. By examining syllable structure from a highly representational viewpoint, I conclude that ‘markedness by complexity’ does have explanatory value and that markedness is explicable in terms of ‘structural complexity’ and ‘length of description’. The core demonstration is based on Charette’s (1990, 1991, 1992) formal typology of consonant clusters (CCs). These papers contain important implicational universals that Charette relates directly to her representations. My contribution will be to enrich the typology and reorganize those principles and parameters into a decision tree or parameter hierarchy that derives the implicational universals. Moreover, the number of parameter settings (the depth in the parameter hierarchy) increases the markedness of the resultant grammar. Crucially, each parametric ‘yes’ setting corresponds to an extra empty phonological category or extra ability to license, or reflects the distance between heads and dependents in the representation. For this reason, markedness is not merely a ‘metaphor’ ‘for a cognitive state’ (Haspelmath 2006), it is directly convertible into linguistic categories. This markedness is not part of the online computation of forms (contra Optimality Theory) and markedness statements cannot be re-ranked to obtain different grammars. However, markedness is one step in the chain of explanation for: (a) the apparent step-wise variation of complexity and implicational universals of consonant clusters, (b) the Trubetzkoy hypothesis.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction – finding a definition and a role for markedness
    • 1.1SFP, modularity and markedness
  • 2.Markedness and syllable structure
    • 2.1Formal markedness in phonology
      • 2.1.1Speculation on why markedness = emptiness
  • 3.Consonant clusters and markedness
    • 3.1Syllable structure markedness and CCs
      • 3.1.1CV
      • 3.1.2CCs
    • 3.2Formalising a typology for CCs
    • 3.3Decision trees, empty nuclei and licensing in strict CV
  • 4.Demonstration, P&P decision tree and stepwise increase in markedness
    • 4.1CV only
    • 4.2Direct CCs before filled not before final empty
    • 4.3Indirect CCs but only before filled
    • 4.4Direct CCs also before final empty
    • 4.5Fully marked
  • 5.Nodes in the decision tree and markedness
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (69)
References
Blevins, Juliette. 1995. The syllable in phonological theory. In The Handbook of Phonological Theory, John A. Goldsmith (ed.), 206–244. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. Evolutionary Phonology. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul. 1999. Functional Phonology. The Hague: HAG. (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Breen, Gavan & Pensalfini, Rob. 1999. Arrernte: A language with no syllable onsets. Linguistic Inquiry 30:1–26. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Calabrese, Andrea. 1988. Towards a Theory of Phonological Alphabets. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. A constraint-based theory of phonological markedness and simplification procedures. Linguistic Inquiry. 26: 373–463.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. Markedness and Economy in a Derivational Model of Phonology. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Charette, Monik. 1990. License to govern. Phonology. 7: 233–253. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1991. Conditions on Phonological Government. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1992. Polish and Mongolian meet government licensing. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 2: 275–291.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1964. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1986. Knowledge of Language. New York NY: Praeger.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. New York NY: Harper & Row.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clements, George N. 1986. Compensatory lengthening in Luganda. In Studies in Compensatory Lengthening, Leo Wetzels & Engin Sezer (eds), 37–76. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clements, George N. & Keyser, Samuel Jay. 1983. CV Phonology: A Generative Theory of the Syllable. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Côte, Marie-Hélène. 2011. Final consonants. In Blackwell Companion to Phonology, Marc van Oostendorp, Colin Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice (eds). Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cover, Thomas M., Gács, Peter & Grey, Robert M. 1989. Kolmogorov’s contributions to information theory and algorithmic complexity. Annals of Probability Theory 17: 840–865. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cullicover, Peter W. 2013. Grammar and Complexity: Language at the Intersection of Competence and Performance. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cyran, Eugeniusz & Gussmann, Edmund. 1999. Consonant clusters and governing relations. In The Syllable: Views and Facts [Studies in Generative Grammar 45], Harry van der Hulst & Nancy A. Ritter (eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Lacy, Paul. 2006. Markedness: Reduction and Preservation in Phonology. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine. 1995. Markedness and the development of prosodic structure. In Proceedings of NELS 25, Jill N. Beckman (ed.). Amherst MA: GLSA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dresher, B. Elan. 2011. The Contrastivity Hierarchy in Phonology. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fikkert, Paula. 1994. On the Acquisition of Prosodic Structure. PhD dissertation, University of Leiden.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fudge, Erik C. 1967. The nature of phonological primes. Journal of Linguistics 3: 1–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gallon, Nicola, Harris, John & van der Lely, Heather K. 2007. Non-word repetition: An investigation of phonological complexity in children with Grammatical SLI. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 21: 435–455. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. 1995. Markedness and Faithfulness Constraints in Child Phonology. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grünwald, Peter. 1996. A minimum description length approach to grammar inference. In Connectionist, Statistical and Symbolic Approaches to Learning for Natural Language Processing, Stefan Wermter, Ellen Riloff & Gabriele Scheler (eds), 203–216. Berlin: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gunasinghe, Hemmali. 1983. Gemination as a Syllable Structure Process in Modern Sinhala. Ms, University of Victoria. <[URL]>
Gurevich, Noami. 2001. A critique of markedness based theories in phonology. Studies in Linguisic Sciences 31(2): 89–114.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hale, Morris & Reiss, Charles. 2000. Substance abuse and dysfunctionalism: Current trends in phonology. Linguistic Inquiry 31: 157–169. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. The Phonological Enterprise. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall, Daniel Currie. 2014. On substance in phonology. Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 1–14.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, John. 1990. Segmental complexity and phonological government. Phonology 7: 255–330. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1994. English Sound Structure. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, John & Gussmann, Edmund. 2002. Word-final onsets. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14: 1–42.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, John, Gallon, Nicola & van der Lely, Heather K. 2007. Prosodic complexity and processing complexity: Evidence from language impairment. Revista da Associação Brasileira de Lingüística 6: 1–19.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of Linguistics 42(1): 25–70. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hume, Elizabeth. 2004. Deconstructing markedness: A predictability-based approach. Proceedings of BLS 30: 182–198. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. 2008. Universals in phonology. The Linguistic Review 25(1–2): 83–137.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kaye, Jonathan. 1990. ‘Coda’ licensing. Phonology Yearbook 7: 301–330. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kaye, Jonathan. 1992. Do you believe in magic? The story of s+C sequences. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 2: 293–313.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kaye, Jonathan D. 2005. GP: I′ll have to put your flat feet on the ground. In Organizing Grammar: Studies in Honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, Hans Broekhuis, Corver, Norbert, Huybregts, Riny, Kleinhenz, Ursula & Jan Koster (eds), 283–288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kaye, Jonathan, Lowenstamm, Jean & Vergnaud, Jean Roger. 1990. Constituent structure and government in phonology. Phonology Yearbook 7:193–231. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kennedy, Robert. 2002. A stress-based approach to Ponapean reduplication. WCCFL 21: 222–235.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 2013. On the empirical bases of phonological typology. Paper presented at the Workshop on Phonological Typology, Oxford.
Lee, Ho-Young. 1990. The Structure of Korean Prosody. PhD dissertation, University College London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levelt, Clara C. 1995. Unfaithful Kids: Place of Articulation Patterns in Early Vocabularies. Colloquium presented at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
Levelt, Clara C., Schiller, Niels O. & Levelt, Willem. 2000. The acquisition of syllable types. Language Acquisition 8(3): 237–264. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lowenstamm, Jean. 1996. CV as the only syllable type. In Current Trends in Phonology. Models and Methods, Jacques Durand & Bernard Laks (eds), 419–441. Salford: ESRI.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. 2013. Syllable Structure. In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Chapter 12, Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds). Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. <[URL]> (9 January 2016).
Marshall, Chloe R., Harris, John & van der Lely, Heather K. 2003. The nature of phonological representations in children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). In The University of Cambridge First Postgraduate Conference in Language Research, Damien Hall, Theodore Markopoulos, Angeliki Salamoura & Sophia Skoufaki (eds), 511–517. Cambridge: Cambridge Institute of Language Research.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Niang, Mamadou Ousmane. 1997. Constraints on Pulaar phonology. Lanham MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reiss, Charles. 2017. Substance free phonology. In Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory, S. J. Hannahs & Anna R. K. Bosch (eds). London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roberts, Ian & Holmberg, Anders. 2010. Introduction: Parameters in minimalist theory. In Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory, Teresa Biberauer, Anders Holmberg, Ian Roberts & Michelle Sheehan (eds). Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Romani, Cristina & Calabrese, Andrea. 1998. Syllabic constraints in the phonological errors of an aphasic patient. Brain and Language 64: 83–121. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Salffner, Sophie. 2010. Tone in the Phonology, Lexicon and Grammar of Ikaan. PhD dissertation, SOAS, University of London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Samuels, Bridget. 2011. Phonological Architecture: A Biolinguistic Perspective. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sanoudaki, Eirini. 2007. Consonant Clusters and the Acquisition of Greek. PhD dissertation. UCL – University of London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scheer, Tobias. 2004. A Lateral Theory of Phonology, Vol 1: What is CVCV, and Why Should it Be? Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tamburelli, Marco, Sanoudaki, Eirini, Jones, Gary & Sowinska, Michelle. 2015. Acceleration in the bilingual acquisition of phonological structure: Evidence from Polish-English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18(4):713–725. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tang, Kevin. 2015. Naturalistic Speech Misperception. PhD dissertation, UCL – University of London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Topintzi, Nina. 2010. Onsets: Suprasegmental and Prosodic Behaviour. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trubetzkoy, Nikolai Sergeyevich. 1939. Principles of Phonology. The Center for Research in Languages and Linguistics. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. <[URL]>
Turnbull, Rory. 2015. Assessing the Listener-oriented Account of Predictability-based Phonetic Reduction. PhD dissertation, Ohio State University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ulfsbjorninn, Shanti. 2009. The internal structure of compounds: A phase account of aphasia. Iberia 1(1):143–168.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. A Field Theory of Stress: The Role of Empty Nuclei in Stress Systems. PhD dissertation, SOAS – University of London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van der Lely, Heather K. 2005. Domain-specific cognitive systems: Insight from Grammatical-SLI. Trends in the Cognitive Sciences 9: 53–59. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Oostendorp, Marc. 1995. Vowel Quality and Phonological Projection. PhD dissertation, University of Tilburg.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vaux, Bert. 2009. The appendix. In Contemporary Views on Architecture and Representations in Phonology, Eric Raimy & Charles E. Cairns (eds), 101–143. Cambridge MA: A Bradford Book, The MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

FAUST, Noam
2025. Branching onsets and empty nuclei. Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics 11:3 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Faust, Noam & Tobias Scheer
2025. Non-final final consonants in the Croissant. Phonology 42 DOI logo
Faust, Noam & Shanti Jeremiah Ulfsbjorninn
2025. The three degrees of metrical strength in Strict CV metrics, a theory without parsing. Journal of Linguistics 61:4 ► pp. 723 ff. DOI logo
Ziková, Markéta, Martin Březina, Radek Čech & Pavel Kosek
2025. The shift away from the marked: Syllabic consonants in historical Czech. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 10:1 DOI logo
Ulfsbjorninn, Shanti
2024. Positional debuccalisation of /s/ in Spanish dialects: the variable cyclicity of prefixes. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9:1 DOI logo
Cavirani, Edoardo
2022. Silent lateral actors: the role of unpronounced nuclei in morpho-phonological analyses. The Linguistic Review 39:4 ► pp. 615 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue