Обзор альтернативных типологий славянских языков

Тематика типологии славянских языков была многократно затронута в разнообразных исследованиях, начиная, по-видимому, со второй половины XIX века. Первой значительной попыткой можно считать негенетическую классификацию славянских языков, сделанную Иваном Александровичем Бодуэном де Куртенэ.1С тех пор, естественно, появились более новые работы, но нельзя ска- зать, что их было очень много. Поэтому цель настоящего краткого обзора – обратить внимание не столько на богатство теорий, а скорее на своеобраз- ность подходов к данной проблематике на разных уровнях изучения языка. Таким образом, целесообразно рассмотреть попытки фонологической, мор- фологической и синтаксической типологии славянских языков отдельно. Та- кое решение подтверждается и тем, что общей типологии, соблюдающей все названные уровни вместе, пока не существует.The typology of Slavic languages has been frequently dealt with in different publications since the late 19th century. In this paper, the author reviews some of the most significant attempts aimed at the phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels of this typological research. It appears that the phonological classification first elaborated by Baudouin de Courtenay has remained reliable to this day. In morphology, however, the only method for categorization seems to be the identification of certain grammatical markers. Syntactic ty- pology is still a young field of linguistics; nevertheless, there exist promising ventures in it, too. It is remarkable that the typological findings for the modern Slavic languages to a large extent coincide with the results of areal studies.Based on the information presented in the paper, the following implications can be made with reference to the typology of the specific linguistic levels in the Slavic languages. The most uniform level is that of phonological typology because in all the models presented here, a key role is played by two prosodic features: the opposition of long and short vowels, on the one hand, and the character of word stress, on the other. Thus, the pho- nological typology first elaborated by Baudouin de Courtenay has proved to be reliable up to the present. At least no competing theories in this field can be seen for the time being.As to morphological typology, it is not possible to identify features or criteria similar to the phonological models which could be applied for the differentiation of whatever mor- phological types. The Slavic languages, even Bulgarian and Macedonian, which have no nominal declension, have remained fusional (inflectional) languages, within which it is not easy to delineate further subtypes. So far, the only way of morphological categorization seems to be the identification and comparison of individual grammatical features of the different Slavic languages, as it is illustrated tentatively in Section 2.The syntactic typology of the Slavic languages is still a very young field of typologi- cal research. Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at any general conclusions on this matter (besides the ones mentioned in Section 3). The model offered by Haspelmath for the Euro- pean languages looks quite promising but it is necessary to work out further details and spe- cific methods so that it could be successfully applied specifically for the Slavic languages.One cannot fail to notice that the typological regularities specified by way of the mor- phological and syntactic observations in Sections 2 and 3, to a marked extent coincide with the facts of the areal (geographical) classification of the Slavic languages, as it was sharply noticed by Bogoroditsky, Janda, Tommola, and other researchers.

Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: Understanding the interchange of ‹ch(t)› and ‹th(t)› in Older Scots

International audience Alphabetic spelling systems rarely display perfectly consistent one-to-one relationships between graphic marks and speech sounds. This is particularly true for languages without a standard written form. Nevertheless, such non-standard spelling systems are far from being anarchic, as they take on a conventional structure resulting from shared communities and histories of practice. Elucidating said structure can be a substantial challenge for researchers presented with textual evidence alone, since attested variation may represent differences in sound structure as well as differences in the graphophonological mapping itself. In order to tease apart these factors, we present a tool-Medusa-that allows users to create visual representations of the relationship between sounds and spellings (sound substitution sets and spelling substitution sets). Our case study for the tool deals with a longstanding issue in the historical record of mediaeval Scots, where word-final <cht>, <ch>, <tht> and <th> appear to be interchangeable, despite representing reflexes of distinct pre-Scots sounds: [x], [xt] and [θ]. Focusing on the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots ([LAOS, 2013]), our exploration surveys key graphemic categories, mapping their lexical distributions and taking us through evidence from etymology, phonological typology, palaeography and historical orthograpy. The result is a novel reconstruction of the underlying sound values for each one of the target items in the record, alongside a series of sound and spelling changes that account for the data.

Tracing the roots of phonetic variation in East Asian Englishes through loan phonology

One key aspect of Englishes in the Kachruvian Expanding Circle concerns phonetic features as they commonly bear traits of speakers native languages. This article explores language contact phenomena that are likely to cause L1L2 phonological transfer, which underlies the phonetic specificity of English in East Asia. Drawing on the general theory of loan phonology, the author treats phonographic adaptation of English loanwords in East Asian languages compared to Russian, as a reliable source of data that supports research on the nature of phonetic variation in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian Englishes. The data were obtained through comparative analysis of English loanwords (200 for each language) selected from dictionary sources and speech samples from the Russian-Asian Corpus of English which was collected in earlier research. The findings confirm typological correlation of phonological transfer in loanword phonographic adaptation and in foreign language phonology. In both linguistic contexts, a crucial role is played by syllabic constraints, because being the fundamental unit of any phonological system, a syllable serves a domain of its segmental and suprasegmental features. Consequently, various resyllabification phenomena occur in English borrowings in the languages of East Asia whose phonological typology is distant from that of English; as a demonstration of this same conflict, the syllabic and, hence, rhythmic organization of East Asian Englishes tends to exhibit similar code-copying variation. The greater typological proximity of English and Russian syllable regulations leads to fewer manifestations of syllabic and rhythmic restructuring in both loanword adaptations and English spoken by native speakers of Russian.

Estimating historical probabilities of natural and unnatural processes

This paper presents a technique for estimating the influences of channel bias on phonological typology. The technique, based on statistical bootstrapping, enables the estimation of historical probability, the probability that a synchronic alternation arises based on two diachronic factors: the number of sound changes required for an alternation to arise and their respective probabilities. I estimate historical probabilities of six attested and unattested alternations targeting the feature [voice], compare historical probabilities of these alternations, perform inferential statistics on the comparison and, to evaluate the performance of the channel bias approach, compare outputs of the diachronic model against the independently observed synchronic typology. The technique also identifies mismatches between the typological predictions of the analytic bias and channel bias approaches. By comparing these mismatches with the observed typology, this paper attempts to quantitatively evaluate the distinct contributions of the two influences on typology in a set of alternations targeting the feature [voice].

Testing the P-Map: Lenition and Position

This study tests the P-Map’s (Steriade, 2001) hypothesis that attested phonological patterns vary depending on phonological context due to differences in the perceptual similarity of two phonological contrasts in different contexts, and that the knowledge of these relative perceptibilities are used to explain cross-linguistic patterns of phonological typology. Specifically, the phenomena in focus are spirantization and devoicing. The study investigates if preference for spirantization of voiced stops in intervocalic position and devoicing of voiced stops in word-final position across languages is correlated with perceptual similarity. Using perceptual similarity tests with native Michigan English speakers on pairs of contrasts in nonsense words, the results show that continuancy contrasts are significantly more similar in intervocalic position than in word-final position, explaining the preference for spirantization intervocalically while voicing contrasts are significantly more similar word-finally, explaining the preference for devoicing word-finally. The results thus support the P-Map’s claim and support a phonetics-based approach to phonology. In addition, since neither phenomenon is a process that happens in Michigan English, the lack of bias in these similarity judgements lends weight to the idea that these results reflect the universal perception of phonological processes.

Phonological typology in Optimality Theory and Formal Language Theory: goals and future directions

Much recent work has studied phonological typology in terms of Formal Language Theory (e.g. the Chomsky hierarchy). This paper considers whether Optimality Theory grammars might be constrained to generate only regular languages, and also whether the tools of formal language theory might be used for constructing phonological theories similar to those within Optimality Theory. It offers reasons to be optimistic about the first possibility, and sceptical about the second.