eBooks - Education - Languages - Peter Chew - A Computational Phonology of Russian
A Computational Phonology of Russian eBook
by Peter Chew
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Windows 98SE+, Mac OS X+, Palm Features
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A Computational Phonology of Russian Summary
| This dissertation provides a coherent, synchronic, broad-coverage, generative phonology of Russian. I test the grammar empirically in a number of ways to determine its goodness of fit to Russian. In taking this approach, I aim to avoid making untested (or even incoherent) generalizations based on only a handful of examples. In most cases, the tests show that there are exceptions to the theory, but at least we know what the exceptions are, a baseline is set against which future theories can be measured, and in most cases the percentage of exceptional cases is reduced to below 5%. The principal theoretical outcomes of the work are as follows. First, I show that all of the phonological or morphophonological processes reviewed can be described by a grammar no more powerful than context-free. Secondly, I exploit probabilistic constraints in the syllable structure grammar to explain why constraints on word-marginal onsets and codas are weaker than on word-internal onsets and codas. I argue that the features [+/- initial] and [+/- final], and extraprosodicity, are unnecessary for this purpose. Third, I claim that /v/ should be lexically unspecified for the feature [+/- sonorant], and that the syllable structure grammar should fill in the relevant specification based on its distribution. This allows a neat explanation of the voicing assimilation properties of /v/, driven by phonotactics. Fourth, I argue that jers in Russian should be regarded as morphological objects, not segments in the phonological inventory. Testing the grammar suggests that while epenthesis cannot be regarded as a major factor in explaining vowel-zero alternations, it might be used to explain a significant minority of cases. Fifth, I suggest that stress assignment in Russian is essentially context-free, resulting from the intersection of morphological and syllable structure constraints. I show that my account of stress assignment is simpler than, but just as general as, the best of the three existing th... |
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eBooks - Titles - Authors - Education - Languages - Peter Chew - A Computational Phonology of Russian eBook