Part of
Beyond Markedness in Formal PhonologyEdited by Bridget D. Samuels
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 241] 2017
► pp. 23–46
Edited by Bridget D. Samuels
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 241] 2017
► pp. 23–46
Chapter 2Contrast is irrelevant in phonology
A simple account of Russian /v/ as /V/
Halle’s (1959) argument against a distinction between morphophonemic and phonemic rules can be understood as an argument against the relevance of contrast to phonology. After adducing further arguments against a role for contrast, the paper provides a simple contrast-free analysis of the classic problem of the voicing behavior of Russian /v/. This segment undergoes voicing assimilation (like other obstruents), but does not trigger it (thus acting like the sonorants). In contrast to a long history of treating /v/ as a covert sonorant, the paper attributes the behavior of Russian /v/, which surfaces always as an obstruent, to underspecification with respect to the feature Voice.
Keywords: contrast, unification, feature-changing, feature-filling, underspecification, Russian, Tangale, vowel harmony, neutralization, allophony, epistemology, Sonorant Voicing, natural class, rule, insertion, deletion, longdistance rules
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.How Halle (1959) banned contrast
- 3.Voicing and sonorants
- 4.Appeals to contrast are opportunistic
- 5.Russian voicing patterns
- 5.1Russian final devoicing
- 5.2Notation
- 5.3Feature changing final devoicing in two steps
- 5.4Feature-changing assimilation in two steps
-
6. ‘Inconsistent’ /v/ is really /V/
- 6.1/V/ is a target of final devoicing
- 6.2/V/ is not a trigger of voicing assimilation
- 6.3/V/ is a target of voicing assimilation
- 6.4Transmission of voicing via /V/
- 7.Conclusions
-
Notes -
References
References (25)
Bale, Alan, Papillon, Maxime & Reiss, Charles. 2014. Targeting underspecified segments: A formal analysis of feature changing and feature filling rules. Lingua 148: 240–253. 
Bale, Alan & Reiss, Charles. 2018. Phonology: A Formal Introduction. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Bale, Alan, Reiss, Charles & Ta-Chun Shen, David. 2016. Sets, rules and natural classes: { } vs. [ ]. Submitted.
Bjorndahl, Christina. 2015. The phonetics and phonology of segment classification. In The Segment in Phonetics and Phonology, Chapter 11, Eric Raimy & Charles Cairns (eds), 236–250. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Burton, Martha W. & Robblee, Karen E. 1997. A phonetic analysis of voicing assimilation in Russian. Journal of Phonetics 25: 97–114.
Dresher, Bezalel E. 2009. The Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology. Cambridge: CUP.
Gordon, Matthew & Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. Phonation types: A cross-linguistic overview. Journal of Phonetics 29: 383–406.
Hale, Mark. 2007. Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method [Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics]. Malden MA: Blackwell.
Hale, Mark, Kissock, Madelyn & Reiss, Charles. 2007. Microvariation, variation and the features of Universal Grammar. Lingua 117: 645–665.
Hale, Mark & Reiss, Charles. 2008. The Phonological Enterprise. Oxford: OUP.
Halle, Morris. 1959. The Sound Pattern of Russian. The Hague: Mouton.
Hayes, Bruce. 1984. The phonetics and phonology of Russian voicing assimilation. In Language Sound Structure, Mark Aronoff & Richard T. Oehrle (eds), 318–328. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
van der Hulst, Harry & van de Weijer, Jeroen. 1995. Vowel harmony. In Handbook of Phonological Theory, John A. Goldsmith (ed.), 495–534. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jakobson, Roman. 1978. Mutual assimilation of Russian voiced and voiceless consonants. Studia Linguistica 32:107–110.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1985. Some consequences of lexical phonology. Phonology Yearbook 2: 85–138.
Mailhot, Frederic & Reiss, Charles. 2007. Computing long-distance dependencies in vowel harmony. Biolinguistics 1(1): 28–48.
McCawley, James D. 1971. On the Role of Notation in Generative Phonology. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Nevins, Andrew. 2010. Locality in Vowel Harmony [Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 55]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Odden, David. 1988. Antiantigemination and the OCP. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 451–475.
Ohala, John. 1990. The phonetics and phonology of aspects of assimilation. In Papers in Laboratory Phonology, I: Between the Grammar and Physics of Speech, John Kingston & Mary Beckman (eds). Cambridge: CUP.
Padgett, Jaye. 2002. Russian voicing assimilation, final devoicing, and the problem of [v]. Ms, University of California, Santa Cruz. Rutgers Optimality Archive, ROA 528.
. 2012. The role of prosody in Russian voicing. In Prosody Matters: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Selkirk, Toni Borowsky (ed.), 181–207. Leeds: Equinox.
Poser, William J. 1993. Are strict cycle effects derivable? In Studies in Lexical Phonology, Sharon Hargus & Ellen M. Kaisse (eds). San Diego CA: Academic Press.
2004. On the status of Chumash sibilant harmony. Ms, University of Pennsylvania.
Reiss, Charles. 2003. Quantification in structural descriptions: Attested and unattested patterns. The Linguistic Review 20: 305–338.
Cited by (39)
Cited by 39 other publications
Mackenzie, Sara
2024. Restricted Structure Preservation in Stratal OT. Linguistic Inquiry 55:4 ► pp. 697 ff. 
Basbøll, Hans
2022. Phonology in Glossematics in Northern and Western Europe. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 331 ff.
Battistella, Edwin
2022. The Prague School. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 221 ff.
Bohas, Georges & Jean Lowenstamm
2022. Thetaṣrīfin the medieval Arabic grammatical tradition. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 83 ff.
Calabrese, Andrea
2022. Historical notes on constraint-and-repair approaches. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 530 ff.
Chandlee, Jane & Adam Jardine
2022. Phonological theory and computational modelling. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 656 ff.
de Boer, Bart
2022. Phonology and evolution. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 694 ff.
Dresher, B. Elan & Harry van der Hulst
2022. Introduction. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 1 ff.
B. Elan Dresher & Harry van der Hulst
2022. The Oxford History of Phonology,
Duanmu, San & Haruo Kubozono
2022. The East Asian tradition. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 64 ff.
Fruehwald, Josef
2022. The study of variation. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 569 ff.
Hall, Kathleen Currie
2022. Corpora and phonological analysis. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 619 ff.
Heinz, Jeffrey & Jonathan Rawski
2022. Learnability in phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 677 ff.
Hulst, Harry van der
2022. The (early) history of sign language phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 284 ff.
Iosad, Pavel
2022. Phonology in the Soviet Union. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 309 ff.
Joseph, John E.
2022. Saussure and structural phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 203 ff.
Kenstowicz, Michael J.
2022. The Sound Pattern of Englishand early generative phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 396 ff.
Kenstowicz, Michael J. & Charles W. Kisseberth
2022. Phonological derivation in early generative phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 419 ff.
Kingston, John
2022. Phonetic explanation in phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 593 ff.
Kiparsky, Paul
2022. Pāṇini. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 38 ff.
Kisseberth, Charles W.
2022. Representations in generative phonology in the 1970s and 1980s. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 440 ff.
Ladd, D. Robert
2022. Mid-century American phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 356 ff.
Lahiri, Aditi & Frans Plank
2022. Phonological phrasing. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 134 ff.
Moro, Elena Battaner & Richard Ogden
2022. John R. Firth and the London School. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 242 ff.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B.
2022. More than seventy years of probabilistic phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 639 ff.
Radwańska-Williams, Joanna
2022. The Kazan School. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 179 ff.
Ritter, Nancy A.
2022. Government Phonology in historical perspective. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 509 ff.
Salmons, Joseph
2022. Nineteenth-century historical linguists’ contributions to phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 163 ff.
Scheer, Tobias
2022. The interaction between phonology and morphosyntax in generative grammar. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 462 ff.
Sen, Ranjan
2022. The Greco-Roman tradition. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 109 ff.
Silverstein, Michael
2022. Boas—Sapir—Bloomfield. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 260 ff.
Sproat, Richard
2022. Writing systems. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 19 ff.
Staun, Jørgen
2022. Dependency Phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 485 ff.
van Oostendorp, Marc
2022. Optimality Theory. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 551 ff.
DRESHER, B. ELAN & DANIEL CURRIE HALL
2021. The road not taken:The Sound Pattern of Russianand the history of contrast in phonology. Journal of Linguistics 57:2 ► pp. 405 ff.
Dresher, B. Elan & Daniel Currie Hall
2022. Developments leading towards generative phonology. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. 372 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. List of Figures and Tables. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. ix ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. List of Abbreviations. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. xiii ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. Copyright Page. In The Oxford History of Phonology, ► pp. iv ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.