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The relationship between coronal place and vowel backness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2004

Edward Flemming
Edward Flemming
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

This paper presents evidence that tongue-body position is always specified in the phonological representation of coronals, even where it is non-contrastive. Tongue-body position is needed to account for the typology of interactions between coronal consonants and adjacent vowels. For example, coronals only condition vowel fronting if they are produced with a front tongue body (usually anterior coronals), and only coronals produced with a back tongue body (usually retroflexes) condition vowel retraction. However, coronals do not have a fixed tongue-body position. Tongue-body position is affected by the position of the tongue tip/blade, because these articulators are physically connected, so each type of coronal has a preferred tongue-body position that facilitates the production of the coronal constriction. These preferences can be overridden, however, e.g. due to assimilation to a vowel. Optimality-theoretic feature co-occurrence constraints provide a good account of this type of dependency between articulators.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , December 2003 , pp. 335 - 373
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Many thanks to audiences at WECOL 2001, Stanford and MIT for comments on talks based on this research, and to the associate editor and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and criticisms.