On the not-exactly-libfixes

In an early post I noted the existence of libfix-like elements where the newly liberated affix mirrors existing—though possibly semantically opaque—morphological boundaries. The example I gave was that of -giving, as in Spanksgiving and Friendsgiving. Clearly, this comes from Thanksgiving, which is etymologically (if not also synchronically) a compound of the plural noun Thanks and the gerund/progressive giving. It seems some morphological innovation has occurred because this gives rise to new coinages and the semantics of -giving is more circumscribed than the free stem giving: it necessarily refers to a harvest-time holiday, not merely to “giving”.

At the time I speculated that it was no accident that the morphological boundaries of the new libfix mimic those of the compound. Other examples I have since collected include –mare (< nightmare; e.g., writemare, editmare); –core (< hardcore; e.g., nerdcore, speedcore) and –step (< two-step; e.g., breakstep, dubstep), both of which refer to musical genres (Zimmer & Carson 2012); –gate (< Watergate; e.g., Climategate, Nipplegate, Troopergate) and –stock (< Woodstock; e.g., Madstock, Calstock), extracted from familiar toponyms, and –position (< exposition; e.g., sexposition, craposition), for which the most likely source can be analyzed as a Latinate “level 1” prefix attached to a bound stem. So, what do we think? Are these libfixes too? Does it matter that recutting mirrors the etymological—or even synchronic—segmentation of the source word?

References

B. Zimmer and C. E. Carson. 2012. Among the new words. American Speech 87(3): 350-368.

tfw it’s not prescriptivism

I think it would be nice to have a term that allowed us to distinguish between politely asking that we preserve existing useful lexical distinctions (such as between terrorism ‘non-state violence against civilians intended to delegitimize the state’ and terms like atrocities or war crimes, between selfie ‘photo self-portrait’ and photo portrait), and full-blown ideologically-driven prescriptivism. I do not have a proposal for what this term ought to be.

Libfix report for December 2019

A while ago I acquired a dictionary of English blends (Thurner 1993), and today I went through it looking for candidate libfixes I hadn’t yet recorded. Here are a few I found. From burlesque, we have –lesque, used to form both boylesque and girlesque. The kumquat gives rise to –quat. This is used in two (literal) hybrid fruits: citrangequat and limequat. From melancholy comes –choly, used to build solemncholy ‘a solemn or serious mood’ and the unglossable lemoncholy. From safari there is –fari, used to build seafari, surfari, and even snowfari. Documentary has given rise to –mentary, as in mockumentary and rockumentary.

An interesting case is that of –stache. While stache is a common clipping of mustache, it is commonly used as an affix as well, as in liquid-based beerstache and milkstache and the pejorative fuckstache and fuzzstache.

I also found a number of libfix-like elements that can plausibly be analyzed as affixes rather than cases of “liberation”. Some examples are –eteer (blacketeer, stocketeer), –legger (booklegger, meatlegger), and –logue (duologue, pianologue, travelogue). I do not think these are properly defined as libfixes (they are a bit like -giving) but I could be wrong.

References

D. Thurner (1993). The Portmanteau Dictionary: Blend Words in the English Language, Including Trademarks and Brand Names. MacFarland & Co.

A theory of error analysis

Manual error analyses can help to identify the strengths and weaknesses of computational systems, ultimately suggesting future improvements and guiding development. However, they are often treated as an afterthought or neglected altogether. In three of my recent papers, we have been slowly developing what might be called a theory of error analysis. The systems evaluated include:

number normalization (Gorman & Sproat 2016); e.g., mapping 97000 onto quatre vingt dix sept mille,
inflection generation (Gorman et al. 2019); e.g., mapping pairs citation form and inflectional specification like (aufbauen, V;IND;PRS;2) onto inflected forms like baust auf, and
grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (Lee et al. 2020); e.g., mapping orthographic forms like almohadilla onto phonemic or phonetic forms like /almoaˈdiʎa/ and [almoaˈðiʎa].

While these are rather different types of problems, the systems all have one thing in common: they generate linguistic representations. I discern three major classes of error such systems might make.

Target errors are only apparent errors; they arise when the gold data, the data to be predicted, is linguistically incorrect. This is particularly likely to arise with crowd-sourced data though such errors are also present in professionally annotated resources.
Linguistic errors are caused by misapplication of independently attested linguistic behaviors to the wrong input representations.
- In the case of number normalization, these include using the wrong agreement affixes in Russian numbers; e.g., nom.sg. *семьдесят миллион for gen.sg. семьдесят миллионов ‘nine hundred million’ (Gorman & Sproat 2016:516)
- In inflection generation, these are what Gorman et al. 2019 call allomorphy errors; e.g., for instance, overapplying ablaut to the Dutch weak verb printen ‘to print’ to produce a preterite *pront instead of printte (Gorman et al. 2019:144).
- In grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, these include failures to apply allophonic rules; e,g, in Korean, 익명 ‘anonymity’ is incorrectly transcribed as [ikmjʌ̹ŋ] instead of [iŋmjʌ̹ŋ], reflecting a failure to apply a rule of obstruent nasalization not indicated in the highly abstract hangul orthography (Lee et al. under review).
Silly errors are those errors which cannot be analyzed as either target errors or linguistic errors. These have long been noted as a feature of neural network models (e.g., Pinker & Prince 1988, Sproat 1992:216f. for discussion of *membled) and occur even with modern neural network models.

I propose that this tripartite distinction is a natural starting point when building an error taxonomy for many other language technology tasks, namely those that can be understood as generating linguistic sequences.

References

K. Gorman, A. D. McCarthy, R. Cotterell, E. Vylomova, M. Silfverberg, and M. Markowska (2019). Weird inflects but OK: making sense of morphological generation errors. In CoNLL, 140-151.
K. Gorman and R. Sproat (2016). Minimally supervised number normalization. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 4: 507-519.
J. L. Lee, L. F.E. Ashby, M. E. Garza, Y. Lee-Sikka, S. Miller, A. Wong, A. D. McCarthy, and K. Gorman (under review). Massively multilingual pronunciation mining with WikiPron.
S. Pinker and A. Prince (1988). On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 28(1–2):73–193.
R. Sproat (1992). Morphology and computation. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Action, not ritual

It is achingly apparent that an overwhelming amount of research in speech and language technologies considers exactly one human language: English. This is done so unthinkingly that some researchers seem to see the use of English data (and only English) as obvious, so obvious as to require no comment. This is unfortunate in part because English is, typologically speaking, a bit of an outlier. For instance, it has uncommonly impoverished inflectional morphology, a particularly rigid word order, and rather large vowel inventory. It is not hard to imagine how lessons learned designing for—or evaluating on—English data might not generalize to the rest of the world’s languages. In an influential paper, Bender (2009) encourages researchers to be more explicit about the languages studied, and this, framed as an imperative, is has come to be called the Bender Rule.

This “rule”, and the aforementioned observations underlying it, have taken on an almost mythical interpretation. They can easily be seen as a ritual granting the authors a dispensation to continue their monolingual English research. But this is a mistake. English hegemony is not merely bad science, nor is it a mere scientific inconvenience—a threat to validity.

It is no accident of history that the scientific world is in some sense an English colony. Perhaps you live in a country that owes an enormous debt to a foreign bank, and the bankers are demanding cuts to social services or reduction of tariffs: then there’s an excellent chance the bankers’ first language is English and that your first language is something else. Or maybe, fleeing the chaos of austerity and intervention, you find yourself and your children in cages in a foreign land: chances are you in Yankee hands. And, it is no accident that the first large-scale treebank is a corpus of English rather than of Delaware or Nahuatl or Powhatan or even Spanish, nor that the entire boondoggle was paid for by the largest military apparatus the world has ever known.

Such material facts respond to just one thing: concrete actions. Rituals, indulgences, or dispensations will not do. We must not confuse the act of perceiving and naming the hegemon with the far more challenging act of actually combating it. It is tempting to see the material conditions dualistically, as a sin we can never fully cleanse ourselves of. But they are the past and a more equitable world is only to be found in the future, a future of our own creation. It is imperative that we—as a community of scientists—take steps to build the future we want.

References

Bender, Emily M. 2009. Linguistically naïve != language independent: why NLP needs linguistic typology. In EACL Workshop on the Interaction Between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, pages 26-32.

Is formal phonology in trouble?

I recently attended the 50th meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS), which is not much of a society as a prestigious generative linguistics conference. In recognition of the golden jubilee, Paul Kiparsky gave a keynote in which he managed to reconstruct nearly all of the NELS 1 schedule, complete with at least one handout, from a talk by Anthony Kroch and Howard Lasnik. Back then, apparently, handouts were just examples: no prose.

In his talk, Paul showed a graph showing that phonology accounts for an increasingly small number of paper at NELS, and in fact the gap has actually gotten worse over the last few decades. Paul proposed something of an explanation: that the introduction of Optimality Theory (OT) and its rejection of “derivational” explanations has forever introduced a schism between phonology and other subareas, and that syntacticians and semanticists are simply uncomfortable with the non-derivational nature of modern phonological theorizing.

With all due respect, I do not find this explanation probable. As he admits, most OT theorizing (including his own) now actually rejects the earlier rejection of derivational explanations. And on the other hand, modern syntactic theories are a heady brew of derivational (phases, copy theory, etc.) and non-derivational (move α, uninterpretable feature matching, etc.) thinking. And finally it’s not really clear why the aesthetic preferences of syntacticians (if that’s all they are) should produce the data, i.e., fewer phonology papers at NELS.

But I do agree that OT is the elephant in the room, responsible for an enormous amount of fragmentation in phonological theorizing.

I would liken Prince & Smolensky’s “founding document” (1993) to Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Scholars believe that Luther wished to start a scholarly theological debate rather than a popular revolution, and I suspect the founders of OT were similarly surprised with the enormous impact their proposal had on the field. Luther’s magnificient heresy may have failed to move the Church in the directions he wished, but he is the father of hundreds if not thousands of Protestant sects, each with their own new and vibrant “heresies”. The founders of OT, I think, are similarly unable to put the cat back into the bag (if they wish to at all).

In my opinion, OT’s early rejection of derivationalism has been an enormous empirical failure, and the full-blown functionalistic-externalist thinking—one of the first post-OT heresies (let’s liken it to Calvinism)—is, in my opinion, ontologically incoherent. That said, I would encourage OT believers to try more theory-comparison. The article on “Christian denominations” in Diderot’s & d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie begins with the obviously insincere suggestion that someone ought to study which of the various Protestant sects is most likely to lead to salvation. But I would sincerely love to find out which variant of OT is in fact most optimal.

[Thanks to Charles Reiss for discussion.]

Should Noam Chomsky retire?

Somebody said he should. I don’t want to put them on blast. I don’t know who they are, really. Their bio says they’re faculty at a public university in the States, so they probably know how things go around here about as well as me. Why should he retire? They suggested that were he to retire his position at the University of Arizona, that it would open up a tenure line for “ECRs”.¹

Let me begin by saying I do not have a particularly strong emotional connection to Noam. Like many linguists, my academic family tree has many roots at MIT, where Noam taught until quite recently. I have met him in person once or twice, and I found him polite and unassuming. This is a surprise to me. The Times once wrote that Noam is “arguably the most important intellectual alive today”, and important people are mostly assholes.

But I do have very strong intellectual commitments to Noam’s ideas. I think that the first chapter of his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) is the best statement of the problem of language acquisition. I believe that those who have taken issue with the Aspects idealization of the “ideal speaker-listener” betray a profound ignorance of the role that idealizations play in the history of science.

I think The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), which Noam cowrote with Morris Halle, is the most important work in the theory of phonology and morphology. I believe that the critics who took issue with the “abstract” and “decompositional” nature of SPE have largely been proven wrong.

I even admire the so-called “minimalist program” for syntactic theory Noam has outlined since the 1990s.

It is impossible to deny Noam’s influence on linguistics and cognitive science. We who study language are all pro- or anti-Chomskyians, for better or worse. (And I have much more respect for the “true haters” than the reflexive anti-Chomskyians.) I don’t think Noam should apologize for his critiques of “usage-based” linguistics. I don’t think Noam can fairly be called an “arm-chair” theorist. I think generative grammar has made untold contributions to even areas like language documentation and sociolinguistics, which might seem to be excluded by a strict reading of Aspects.

And, I admire Noam’s outspoken critique of US imperialism. While Noam may have some critics from the left, his detractors (including many scientists of language!) are loud defenders of the West’s blood-soaked imperial adventures.

As a colleague said: “I like Noam Chomsky. I think his theories are interesting, and he seems like a decent guy.” He is a great example of what one can, and ought to, do with tenure.

None of this really matters, though. I do not think he “deserves” a job any more than any other academic does. So, could Noam clear up a “tenure line” simply by retiring? The answer is probably not. Please allow me an anecdote, one that will be familiar to many of you. I teach in a rather-large and robust graduate linguistics program at a publicly-funded college in one of the richest cities in the world (“at the end of history”). Two of our senior faculty are retiring this year, and as of yet the administration has not approved our request to begin a search for a replacement for either of them. Declining to replace tenure lines after retirement is one of the primary mechanisms of casualization in the academy.

Even if you disagree with my assessment of Noam’s legacy, the availability of tenure is not directly conditioned on retirements (though perhaps it should be). Noam bears no moral burden for simply not retiring. If you’d like to fight back against casualization of labor, take the fight to the administration (and to the state houses who set the budgets), don’t blame senior faculty for simply continuing to exist in the system.

PS: If you enjoyed this, you should read The Responsibility of Intellectuals.

¹: I had to look up this acronym. It stands for “early-career researchers”, though I’m not quite sure when one’s “early career” starts or ends. I find that an unfortunate ambiguity.

Latin vowel-glide alternations

Post-war structuralist phonology greatly emphasized phonemics and largely ignored morphophonemics. But in 1959, Morris Halle’s Sound Pattern of Russian argued that the distinction between allophony and alternation has little cognitive importance, and in fact the distinction leads to an unnecessary duplication of effort. As a result of Halle’s forceful arguments, the contrast between phonemic and morphophonemic processes plays little role in modern phonological theory. I would like to go one step further and suggest that patterns of alternation are actually more principled facts than those of allophony. Simply put, a speaker must command the pattern of alternation in their language; but it is not at all clear whether they exploit allophony when constructing their lexical entries. This is highlighted most clearly by the notions of lexicon optimization, Stampean occultation, and richness of the base in Optimality Theory, though as Hale et al. (1998) note, similar points apply to rule-based theories.

In writing the Romans did not draw distinctions between the high monophthongs [i, u, iː, uː] and glides [j, w], respectively. This naturally led structuralist linguists (e.g., Hall 1946) to suggest that the glides are allophones of the high monophthongs. There are some apparent problems with this suggestion, though not all of them are fatal. One point that has largely been ignored in this discussion is that Classical Latin has at least four types of plausible alternations between high monophthongs and the corresponding glides. In this squib I review these alternations.

Deverbal -u- derivatives

There are a large number of adjectival derivatives formed from verbal stems by the addition of -u- and the appropriate agreement suffixes, e.g., masculine nominative singular (masc. nom.sg.) -u-us, feminine nom.sg. -u-a, and neuter nom.sg. -u-um, and so on. These derivatives have a similar semantics to past participles (“having been Xed”) but in some cases have a secondary meaning “able to be Xed”. For example, the masc. nom.sg. form dīuiduus [diːwi.du.us] means ‘divided’ (cf. dīuidō [diːwi.doː] ‘I divide’) but also ‘divisible’. This is a fairly productive process, as the following examples show. (I have taken the liberty of leaving off certain further productive derivatives, such as intensified adjectives in per-.)

(1) assiduus ‘constant, ambiguus ‘hither and thither’, annuus ‘annual, arduus ‘elevated’, cernuus ‘bowed forward’, circumfluus ‘flowing around’ (refluus ‘ebbing’), cōnspicuus ‘visible’, contiguus ‘neighboring’, continuus ‘continuous’, dīuiduus ‘divided; divisible’ (indīuiduus ‘undivided; indivisible’), exiguus ‘strict’, fatuus ‘foolish’, incaeduus ‘uncut’, ingenuus ‘indigenous’, irriguus ‘irrigated’, mēnstruus ‘monthly’, mortuus ‘dead’ (dēmortuus ‘departed’, intermortuus ‘decayed’, praemortuus ‘prematurely dead’), mūtuus ‘borrowed’ (prōmūtuus ‘paid in advance’), nocuus ‘harmful’ (innocuus ‘harmless’), occiduus ‘westerly’, pāscuus ‘for pasturing’, perpetuus ‘perpetual’, perspicuus ‘transparent’, praecipuus ‘particular’, prōmiscuus ‘indiscriminate’, residuus ‘remaining’, riguus ‘irrigated’, strēnuus ‘brisk’, succiduus ‘sinking’, superuacuus ‘superfluous’, uacuus ’empty’, uiduus ‘destitute’

In all the above cases …uus is read [u.us]. However, when the stem ends in a liquid [l, r] …uus is read [wus], indicating that the deadjectival affix is realized as [w].

(2)
a. caluus ‘bald’, fuluus ‘reddish-yellow, tawny’, giluus ‘pale yellow’, heluus ‘honey yellow’
b. aruus ‘arable’, curuus ‘bent’ (incuruus ‘bent’), furuus ‘dark, swarthy’, paruus ‘small’, prōteruus ‘violent’, toruus ‘savage’

It is interesting to note that the contexts where -u- is realized as [w] align with a well-known allophonic generalization (Devine & Stephens 1977: 61., 134f.): a u preceded by a (tautomorphemic) coda liquid or front glide, and followed by a vowel, is realized as [w], as in silua [sil.wa] ‘forest’ or ceruus [ker.wus] ‘deer’, but is realized as a vowel when the preceding consonant is either a nasal, an obstruent, or part of a consonant cluster, as in lituus [li.tu.us] ‘trumpet’ or patruus [pa.tru.us] ‘paternal uncle’.

Two residual issues remain. First, when the verbal stem end in qu [kw], the adjectival derivative is spelled …quus. By the normal rules of spelling this would be read as [kwus], which would suggest that a zero allomorph of the adjectival suffix is selected for here.

(3) aequus ‘equal’, antīquus ‘old’, fallāciloquus ‘falsely speaking’ (fātiloquus ‘prophetic’, flexiloquus ‘ambiguous’, grandiloquus ‘grandiloquent’, magniloquus ‘boastful’, uāniloquus ‘lying’, uersūtiloquus ‘slyly speaking’), inīquus ‘unjust’, longinquus ‘distant’, oblīquus ‘slanting, oblique’, pedisequus ‘following on foot’, propinquus ‘near’, reliquus ‘remaining’

This is consistent with the metrical evidence. For instance in the following verse, aequus must be read as bisyllabic.

Secondly, there are a number of deverbal derivatives in -u-us where the verb form also has a stem-final [w]. In this case we also observe [wus].

(5)
a. cauus [ka.wus] ‘hollowed; hollow’ (concauus ‘hollow’); cf. cauō [ka.woː] ‘I excavate’
b. flāuus [flaː.wus] ‘yellow, gold, blonde’ (sufflāuus ‘yellowish’); cf. flāueō [flaː.we.oː] ‘I am yellow’
c. (g)nāuus [naː.wus] ‘active’ (īgnāuus ‘lazy’); cf. nāuō [naː.woː] ‘I do s.t. enthusiastically’
d. nouus [no.wus] ‘new’; cf. nouō [no.woː] ‘I renew’
e. saluus [sal.wus] ‘safe; well’; cf. salueō [sal.we.oː] ‘I am well’
f. uīuus [wːi.wus] ‘living’ (rediuīuus ‘restored to life’); cf. uīuō [wiː.woː] ‘I live’

This may be another context where the adjectival suffix has a zero allomorph, though it is not clear whether we are looking at the same derivational process as above.

The foregoing discussion leads me to posit a deverbal adjective-forming suffix /-u-/ with two phonologically-predictable allomorphs: [w] before liquids, and zero before [kw] and possibly, [w].

The “third stem”

Schoolchildren learning Latin memorize four forms (or principal parts) of each verb: the first person singular (1sg.) present active indicative (e.g., amō ‘I love’), the present infinitive (amāre ‘to love’), the 1sg. perfect active (amāvī ‘I loved’), and the perfect passive participle (amātus masc. nom.sg. ‘loved). The first two principal parts effectively index the so-called “present stem” of the verb, and the third principal part gives the so-called “perfect stem”. The relationship between the present and perfect stem is often unpredictable. Some perfect stems lengthen a monophthong in the final syllable of the present stem (e.g., legō/lēgī ‘I choose/chose’); some perfect stems omit a post-vocalic nasal in the final syllablem with comcomitant lengthening (uincō/uīcī ‘I win/won’); some are mutated by the addition of a -s- perfect suffix (dīcō/dīxī [diː.koː, diːk.siː] ‘I say/said’); others bear a CV-reduplication prefix, and so on. This has lead some to suggest that the latter two stems are essentially “listed” or “stored” for all verbs. This is, for instance, the position of Lieber (1980:141f., 152f.), but has been disputed by Aronoff (1994: chap. 2) and Steriade (2012), among others, who claim there are many productive regularities in both cases.

The majority of verbs have perfects that consist of the bare verb root, the theme vowel, a high back vocoid perfect suffix, and the appropriate person-number agreement suffixes (e.g., 1sg. -ī-). The perfect suffix is preceded by a theme vowel and as the appropriate agreement suffixes are all vowel-initial, it is always intervocalic. Allophonically, this is a context where [u] is never found but [w] is, and this is what we find here: amāuī [a.maː.wiː] ‘I loved’. This type of perfect is in fact found in all conjugations, and found in the overwhelming majority of 1st (-ā- theme vowel) and 4th conjugation (-ī-) verbs (Aronoff 1994:43f.).

(6)
a. cōnsōlāuī [kon.soː.laː.wiː], portāuī [por.taː.wiː] ‘I carried’
b. dēlēuī [deː.leː.wiː] ‘I destroyed’, plēuī [pleː.wiː] ‘I filled up’
c. cupīuī [ku.piː.wiː] ‘I desired’, petīuī [pe.tiː.wiː] ‘I sought’
d. audīuī [aw.diː.wiː] ‘I listened to’, mūnīuī [muː.niː.wiː] ‘I fortified’

However, there is an alternative formulation in which the theme vowel is omitted, placing the perfect suffix to the right of a consonant, and in this context it is instead realized as [u]. This type of perfect is also found in all conjugations but is most common in the 2nd (-ē-) conjugation.

(7)
a. domuī [do.mu.iː] ‘I tamed’, uetuī [we.tu.iː] ‘I forbid’
b. docuī [do.ku.iː] ‘I taught’, tenuī [te.nu.iː] ‘I held’
c. rapuī [rap.u.iː] ‘I snatched’, texuī [tek.su.iː] ‘I wove’
d. aperuī [a.pe.ru.iː] ‘I opened’, saluī [sa.lu.iː] ‘I leapt’

Together the patterns in (6-7) account for the vast majority of perfects in all conjugations except the 3rd (itself a grab-bag of etymologically dissimilar verbs).

I propose that the default perfect suffix is /-u-/ and that it undergoes glide formation to [w] in (6), in intervocalic position, a generalization consistent with the allophonic facts. In (7), when adjacent to the verb root, glide formation is blocked. However, the examples in (7) cannot take a “free ride” on any allophonic generalization. As can be seen in (7d), the perfect suffix does not form [l.w, r.w] syllable contact clusters, unlike the adjectival suffix in (5). There is a surfeit of possible analyses for the failure of glide formation in this context: it might be an effect specific to the perfect suffix or to the category of verb, or the result of cyclicity or phase-based spellout. We leave the question open for now.

The “fourth stem”

The form of the perfect passive participle, the fourth principal part, similarly problematic. For many verbs, the perfect passive participle is formed by adding to the verb root a -t- suffix and the appropriate agreement suffixes (e.g., in citation form, the masc. nom.sg. -us), once again sometimes accompanied by lengthening of the stem-final vowel and/or leftward voice assimilation (an exception-less rule of Latin) triggered by the -t- as in (8b).

(8)
a. docuī [do.ku.iː] ‘I teach’, doctus [dok.tus] masc. nom.sg ‘taught’
b. tegō [te.goː] ‘I clothe’, tēctus [tek.tus] masc. nom.sg. ‘clothed’

Two verb roots which end in consonant followed by a high back vocoid and form a -t- perfect passive participle: soluō [solwoː] ‘I loosen; I explain’ and uoluō [wolwoː] ‘I roll’. This places the root-final high back vocoid, by hypothesis /u/, between two consonants, a context where glides are forbidden. The result is solūtus [soluːtus] and uolūtus [woluːtus]. However, it should be noted that this particular pattern is limited to these two verbs and their derivatives, and that the long ū is unexpected unless it reflects stem vowel lengthening (cf. tēctus above).

Synizesis and diaeresis

Latin poetry exhibits variation in glide formation. (The following examples are all drawn from Lehmann 2005). Synizesis, the unexpected overapplication of glide formation in response to the meter, can be seen in the following verse.

In this verse, tenuis ‘thin’ occurs initially, which requires that the first syllable be heavy. The only way to accomplish this is to read it as the bisyllabic [ten.wis] rather than the expected trisyllabic [te.nu.is]. Similarly, in another verse (Verg., Aen. 8.599), abiēte, the ablative singular of abiēs ‘silver fir’, must be read as trisyllabic [ab.jeː.te] rather than the expected [ab.i.eː.te].

On the other hand, the poets also make use of diaeresis, or apparent underapplication of glide formation. For example, siluae, the genitive singular of silua ‘forest’, is in one verse (Hor., Carm. 1.23.4) read as trisyllabic [si.lu.aj] rather than as the expected bisyllabic [sil.waj]. The conditions governing synizesis and diaeresis are not yet well understood, but they constitute further evidence for the close grammatical relationship between [i ~ j] and [u ~ w] in Classical Latin.

Conclusion

We have seen four ways in which the Latin high vocoids alternate between vowels and glides. Together, these four patterns provide indirect evidence for the hypothesis that Latin glides are allophones of the corresponding high vowels, though there are some minor dissociations between patterns of allophony and alternations.

[Earlier writing about Latin glides: Latin glides and the case of “belua”]

References

Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself: stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Devine, Andrew M., and Stephens, Laurence D. 1977. Two studies in Latin phonology. Saratoga: Anma Libri.
Hall, Robert A. 1946. Classical Latin noun inflection. Classical Philology 41(2): 84-90.
Hale, Mark and Kissock, Madelyn, and Reiss, Charles. 1998. Output-output correspondence in Optimality Theory. In Proceedings of WCCFL, pages 223-236.
Halle, Morris. 1959. The sound pattern of Russian. The Hague: Mouton.
Lehmann, Christian. 2005. La structure de la syllabe latine. In Touratier, Christian (ed.), Essais de phonologie latine, pages 157-206. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence.
Lieber, Rochelle. 1980. On the organization of the lexicon. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Steriade, Donca. 2012. The cycle without containment: Latin perfect stems. Ms., MIT.

Latin glides and the case of “belua”

Latin texts leave the distinction between high monophthongs [i, u, ī, ū] and glides [j, w] unspecified. This has lead some to suggest that the glides are allophones of the monophthongs. For instance, Steriade (1984) implies that the syllabicity of [+high, +vocalic] segments in Latin is largely predictable. Steriade points out two contexts where high vocoids are (almost) always glides: initially before a vowel (# __ V) and intervocalically (V __ V). In these two contexts, the only complications I am aware of arise from competition between generalizations. For instance, in ūua [uː.wa] ‘grape’ and ūuidus [uː.wi.dus] ‘damp’, intervocalic glide formation appears to bleed word-initial glide formation. (Or it could be the case that ū is ineligible for glide formation by virtue of its length.) And the behavior of two adjacent high vocoids flanked by vowels is somewhat idiosyncratic: compare naevus [naj.wus] ‘birthmark’ and saeuiō [saj.wi.oː] ‘I am furious’, where (by hypothesis) /ViuV/ surfaces as [j.w], to dēuius [deː.wi.us] ‘devious’ and pauiō [pa.wi.oː] ‘I beat’, where (by hypothesis) /VuiV/ surfaces as [.wi] but never as *[w.j]. And so on.

However, Cser (2012) claims that syllabicity of high vocoids is not at all predictable after a consonant and before a vowel, i.e., in the context C __ V. Here we usually observe [w] when the preceding consonant is coda [j, l, r], as in the aforementioned naevus or silua [sil.wa] ‘forest’. Cser contrasts this latter form with belua ‘wild beast’, which is trisyllabic rather than bisyllabic. However, it is not clear this is a good near-minimal pair. The word was clearly not pronounced as [be.lu.a] because the first syllable scans heavy. In the following hexameter verse, the word comprises the fifth foot, a dactyl:

et centumgeminus Briareus, ac belua Lernae (Verg., Aen. 6.287)

Lewis & Short and the Oxford Latin Dictionary both give this word as bēlua [beː.lu.a]. However, it seems much more likely that the word is in fact bellua [bel.lu.a], as it was sometimes written. (Note also that tautomorphemic geminate ll is robustly attested in Latin.) In this case we would expect glide formation to be blocked because the [lw] complex onset is totally unattested, just as Cser predicts from general principles of sonority sequencing. Thus the above verse is:

As Cser notes, many of the remaining near-minimal pairs occur at morphological boundaries⁠—and thus look to someone with my theoretical commitments as evidence for the phonological cycle—or relate to the complex onsets qu [kw] and su [sw], which might be treated as contour segments underlyingly. But much work will be needed to show that these apparent exceptions follow from the grammar of Latin.

References

Cser, András. 2012. The role of sonority in the phonology of Latin. In Parker, Steve (ed.), The sonority controversy, pages 39-64. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Steriade, Donca. 1984. Glides and vowels in Romanian. In Proceedings of the Berkeley Lingusitics Society, pages 47-64.

Exceptions to reduplication in Kinande

Mutaka & Hyman’s (1990) study of reduplication in Kinande, a Bantu language spoken in “Eastern Zaire” (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), is the sort of phonology study one doesn’t see much of anymore. The authors begin by noting the recent interest in reduplication phenomena, but note that most of the major work has completely ignored Bantu, an enormous language family in which nearly every language has one or more type of reduplication. Mutaka & Hyman (MH) proceed to describe Kindande reduplication in detail, with only occasional reference to other languages.

Nouns that undergo reduplication have the semantics of roughly ‘the real X’. Most Kinande verbs also undergo reduplication, with the semantics of roughly ‘to hurriedly X’ or ‘to repetitively X’. Verbal reduplication is somewhat more interesting because certain other verbal suffixes (or “extensions”, as they’re sometimes called in Bantu) may also be found in the reduplicant, argued to be a roughly-bisyllabic prefix. For instance, the passive suffix is argued to be underlyingly /u/ but surfaces as [w], and is copied over in reduplication. Thus for the verb hum ‘beat’ the passive e-ri-hum-w-a ‘to be beaten’ reduplicates as erihumwahumwa. However, larger vowel-consonant verbal suffixes are not copied; the applied (-ir-) passive infinitive e-ri-hum-ir-w-a ‘to be beaten for’ has a reduplicated form erihumahumirwa, and for the verb tum ‘send’ the applied passive reciprocal (-an-) infinitive e-rí-tum-ir-an-w-a ‘to be sent to each other’ has a reduplicated form erítumatumiranwa (MH, 56).

What’s even more interesting to me is the behavior of verb stems with what MH call ‘unproductive’ extensions (all of which appear to be vowel-consonant). MH report that for only a small minority of these verb stems is there any plausible etymological relationship to a verb without the extension. One example is luh-uk-a ‘take a rest’ which is plausibly related to luh-a ‘be tired’ (MH, 73e), but there is no *bát-a paired with bát-uk-a ‘move’ (MH, 74d). Verb stems bearing unproductive suffixes may have one of three behaviors with respect to reduplication. For some such stems, reduplication is forbidden: eríbugula ‘to find’. For others, reduplication occurs but the ‘unproductive’ extension is stranded (the same behavior as the ‘productive’ extensions): e-rí-banguk-a ‘to jump about’ reduplicates as eríbangabanguka. Finally, some such stems (roughly half) unexpectedly build a trisyllabic (rather than bisyllabic) reduplicant consisting of the verb root and the unproductive extension: e-ri-hurut-a ‘to snore’ reduplicates as erihurutahuruta (MH, 75). This entire distribution poses a fascinating puzzle. How is the failure of reduplication encoded in the first case? What licenses the trisyllabic reduplicant in the last case?

References

Mutaka, Ngessimo and Hyman, Larry M. 1990. Syllables and morpheme integrity in Kinande reduplication. Phonology 7: 73-119.