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gw.bsu.edu>Jess Tauber writes: > The signal inversion hypothesis extrapolates feature density until even "phonemes" can be considered as entire utterances some time in the distant ancestry of man. With just 16 binary feature pairs, with one choice always instantiated for each pair, will generate well over 50000 separate units. Larry Trask responds: >OK. But I would like to know just what those 16 binary features are.Can we be assured that all 65,536 combinations of these features are physiologically possible and auditorily distinct? I find this hard to believe. Just to start with, I find that any single nasal stop, produced in isolation, is usually next to impossible to distinguish from any other nasal stop. I also find it very hard to distinguish one voiceless plosive from another, without the aid of neighboring vowels. Herb Stahlke writes: Beyond the paradigmatic question of how many feature combinations there can be, there is the syntagmatic question of what's a possible sequence and the further question, that linguists rarely ask, of how many cells in a particular matrix will be filled in a particular language. Yoruba, for example, defines the verb as a CV syllable with a tone. Given 17 consonants, 10 vowels, and 3 tones, the three-dimensional matrix would contain 510 cells. By the time you factor out phonologically impermissible forms, like nasal consonants followed by oral vowels, the matrix is reduced only slightly, to about 470. Of these, based on an exhaustive search of several Yoruba dictionaries, a total of 332 actually occur. These are distributed throughout the matrix with some random gaps. Similar studies of a number of languages with similar constraints show that the Yoruba ratio .7 is actually quite high. Consider possible English CVC monosyllables, where the ration is less than .5. Clear it's not a matter of straight combinatorics. Rather, distinctiveness within the mental lexicon is also a factor.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
aol.com>Responding to Larry Trask's posting: I don't have any particular prejudice regarding the actual number of coarticulations that might actually be possible in nonhuman communication- it could very well be lower than 16 pairs of features, and it could also be that not all feature pairs are always instantiated in any utterance. Just a demonstration of a "what-if" to show that a holistic "phoneme/morpheme/phrase/clause/etc." might be able to contain quite a bit of information. But apes do appear to be able to do things we can't (such as utilize supralaryngeal air sacs, perhaps have several different bilabial articulations, engage the glottis with the nasal system to different degrees, etc.), just as they cannot (at all or easily) do many of the things we can. But let's suppose a multidimensional feature-string matrix were complex, and ideophone-like in that iconic organization is at a premium, so that neighboring cells in the matrix would have a minimum semantic difference between them in parallel to the phonological distance. Precision would be a real necessity, IF the difference between members within any dimension were small, or IF there was (near) overlap qualitywise between members of different dimensions. Potential difficulties of this sort are supposed to be responsible for the optimization of the human oral tract to produce maximally different phonological contrasts. But we're still thinking in terms of HUMAN phonemes- with syllable structure, oral articulatory position, etc. A holistic scheme may be a bit more alien than that. Featural density per segment may be less of a problem if one increases the frequency range used for distinctive signalling. We use formants 0,1,2,3. What if you could use higher ones, and with a broader range than we do? Primates are supposed to utilize some of these higher formants for individuation/identity marking, while low pitched grunts are utilized to mark group solidarity (self effacement?). Fair enough. Can these higher formants be tweaked to create contrasts independently of lower ones? And maybe I'm being unfair to linguists generally as regards holistic communication- true, human language doesn't have much of anything like that. Kind of limiting, though. I can just imagine such limitation getting us into a shooting war if and when we ever meet space aliens for real. Ideophones. Harummph. Kinda reminds me of the apocryphal aside by Huxley on hearing Soapy Sam's remark about his lineage at the Darwin debate. Ideophones may be peripheral in some languages, but in others they are pretty darned important. One scholar recently told me that expressive roots comprise more than 30% of the total in Uralic languages. Various Mon-Khmer languages are swimming in thousands of them, as are Japanese and Korean. On the basis of percentage of attested roots in the language, these items will rate very high, either as free forms with their own word class, or percolated historically into the regular lexical root stock. Indo-European languages have very many cases of such expressive roots hidden within regular lexemes. Indeed, the manner component of verbal semantics would be severely impoverished if not for the enrichment from this source, among others. It is interesting that it is in just those languages with reduced stocks of "real" verb roots that we find a proliferation of ideophone/expressive forms. Altaic verbs, for instance, appear for the most part to derive either from nouns/adjectives or expressives plus auxiliaries, of which there is a rather short list. Similar derivation is found in many Australian languages. And I could go on (and on). Finally, as to economy of expression- primates don't have much of a manufactured world, so don't require the largish vocabulary segment for this as we do. Combinatoriality is at a minimum socially as well, so all the high words many cultures have are out. Primary colors, for everything. And without the need for indirection (which we excel in), what is the point of drawing messages out. Anything of relevance is here, now, in your face. The natural world tends to be relatively constant, with natural classes of items/beings there for everyone to see. So unless individuation is necessary, use class terms. Generalize. Be blunt. Get to the point and stop wasting my time. Life is hard enough. So just how much vocabulary would we need in such circumstances? I've recently heard that common chimps have at least NINE food calls. Wouldn't one have been sufficient? Vervet monkeys have their three predator calls. Then there is the Morton continuum of calls for challenge, appeasement, etc., possibly quantized. The question is whether calls from any semantic domain are systematized, and whether the system is iconically organized. Nobody will look unless asked, that's clear. A hierarchical organization could help distinguish basic classes of call semantic domains, and then further distinctions could be handled by extra features. Don't have a clue how much nonacoustic signalling accompanies or how much context comes into play. Jess Tauber zylogyMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue