Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels
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Bariş Kabak
Abstract
Evaluating Trudgill's correlation of phoneme inventory size with social factors, this paper highlights the role of phonological structure in the acquisition of phonological contrast, with particular reference to Turkic and Korean vowel inventories. Factors such as social dominance, isolation, and community size are shown not to provide plausible explanations for the loss of primary long vowels in most Turkic languages and their preservation in a few others, nor for the neutralization which long and short vowels currently undergo in Korean. It is suggested that such changes in phoneme inventories can be better understood as a result of phonetic and phonological processes involving the contrastive features and phonological contexts that define the phonemes in question. Processes referring to vowel length in Turkic and Korean are argued to have obscured its contrastive status in the organization of phonological knowledge by the speakers of these languages.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories
- Language contact, phonemic inventories, and the Athapaskan language family
- Consonant inventories as an areal feature of the New Guinea-Pacific region: Testing Trudgill's hypotheses
- Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels
- Phoneme inventories, language contact, and grammatical complexity: A critique of Trudgill
- There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language
- On the complexity of simplification
- Yan Huang, Anaphora: A Cross-linguistic Study
- Nicholas Evans & Hans-Jürgen Sasse, Problems of Polysynthesis
- Walter Bisang, Aspects of Typology and Universals
- Contents of Linguistic Typology Volume 8 (2004)
Articles in the same Issue
- Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories
- Language contact, phonemic inventories, and the Athapaskan language family
- Consonant inventories as an areal feature of the New Guinea-Pacific region: Testing Trudgill's hypotheses
- Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels
- Phoneme inventories, language contact, and grammatical complexity: A critique of Trudgill
- There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language
- On the complexity of simplification
- Yan Huang, Anaphora: A Cross-linguistic Study
- Nicholas Evans & Hans-Jürgen Sasse, Problems of Polysynthesis
- Walter Bisang, Aspects of Typology and Universals
- Contents of Linguistic Typology Volume 8 (2004)
