Alternation
Alternation refers to the variation or change in linguistic elements, such as sounds, words, or grammatical structures, within a language. It can occur due to different phonological, morphological, or syntactic processes and often reflects the diverse ways in which a language expresses meaning. Understanding alternation is crucial for analyzing language patterns and identifying linguistic rules and regularities.
6 Key excerpts on "Alternation"
eBook - ePub- Bruce Hayes(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...6 Phonological Alternation I 6.1 Alternation as a Consequence of Phonology–Morphology Interaction A morpheme is said to alternate when it appears in different forms in different contexts. The analysis of Alternations is one of the central areas of phonology. Alternation often arises because of the way that phonology interacts with morphology. To show how this happens, it will be useful first to present some background material on the morphology and phonology of English. 6.1.1 Alternations in English /t/-final stems Here are some phonological rules of English, some repeated from earlier, all of which apply to the phoneme /t/ and give rise to Alternation. The rule of Preglottalization derives the preglottalized allophones of /p, t, k/ when they occur in word-final position: Preglottalization A voiceless stop is realized as preglottalized when in final position. By “preglottalized,” I mean that the vocal cords slam shut just before the stop is made. This is represented in the feature system with the feature [+constricted glottis], and transcribed here with a preceding superscript glottal stop. Here are representative data: cap /kæp/ [kæˀp] hat /hæt/ [hæˀt] hack /hæk/ [hæˀk] Preglottalization is optional, but we will ignore this fact here, with no harm to the point being made. The rule of Tapping (p. 32) realizes the /t/ phoneme as a tap [ɾ] just in case it occurs between two syllabic sounds of which the second is stressless. Using the features of chapter 4, it appears as follows: Tapping 1 Tapping is also optional, at least for some speakers. English also has an allophonic rule of Aspiration, which applies obligatorily to the voiceless stops /p, t, tʃ, k/, rendering them [+spread glottis]...
eBook - ePub- R.L. Trask, Peter Stockwell, Peter Stockwell(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Alternation A variation in the form of a linguistic element depending on where it occurs. Certain English nouns ending in the consonant /f/ form their plurals with /v/ instead: leaf but leaves, knife but knives. We say that such items exhibit an /f/–/v/ Alternation. For most (not all) speakers a similar Alternation occurs in singular house (with /s/) but plural houses (with /z/), though here our spelling system does not represent the Alternation explicitly. A somewhat different sort of Alternation is found in related words like electric (which ends in /k/) and electricity (which has /s/ instead of /k/ in the same position). More subtle is the three-way Alternation occurring in the English plural marker. The noun cat has plural cats, pronounced with /s/, but dog has plural dogs, pronounced with /z/ (though again the spelling fails to show this), and fox has plural foxes, with /z/ preceded by an extra vowel. This Alternation is regular and predictable; the choice among the three alternants (as they are called) is determined by the nature of the preceding sound. Alternations are exceedingly common in the world’s languages, and they are often of great interest to linguists trying to produce elegant descriptions of languages. Where pronunciation changes at a grammatical boundary, as in the examples at morpheme boundaries above, these are called sandhi, a term deriving from the ancient Sanskrit grammarians. Changes to morpheme pronunciation within a single word are internal sandhi; external sandhi also occurs across word boundaries, as in the introduction of an ‘intrusive /r/’ between ‘law and order’, a /w/ between ‘mellow elephant’, or the merging of word-final /t/ and word-initial /j/ in ‘don’t you’ into a single affricate /tʃ/. See also : phonetics ; phonology ; phonotactics Futher reading : Ball and Rahilly 1999; Bloomfield 1933; Hockett 1958; Lass 1984; Matthews 1991; Sommerstein 1977....
eBook - ePubThe Sounds of Language
An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology
- Elizabeth C. Zsiga(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Sometimes we do this by studying lists of words in order to discover different kinds of sound distributions. Sometimes we look at what happens to borrowed words. Another way is by studying Alternations. In each case, we seek to discover the relationship between underlying and surface forms, and the different phonotactic constraints that determine what sounds appear where. Section 11.3 now turns to a survey of the different kinds of Alternations common in the languages of the world, giving us a broader understanding of the range of facts for which any theory of phonology needs to account (as well as a better ability to discern the types of patterns we’re likely to find in new datasets.) 11.3 Alternations: What to Expect The goal of this section is to illustrate different kinds of phonological Alternations, so that you may come to know what to expect. The material is summarized in Table 11.1, which lists common Alternations, their definition, and the examples that are listed here. For reasons of space, only a few examples from a few languages are given, but the examples have been chosen to be representative of what can be found across a wide variety of languages. Some cases are well known and much-discussed in the literature (and therefore worth becoming familiar with); others are less well known. References for each set of data are found at the end of the chapter. The terms are, to the extent possible, descriptive rather than formal...
eBook - ePub- Mike Davenport, S.J. Hannahs(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These Alternations are a central part of what native speakers ‘know’ about their language, and the goal of the generative enterprise is the formal representation of such knowledge (see Section 1.2). As was mentioned briefly in Section 8.3, and as we will see shortly, it should be borne in mind that rules are not the only way to connect Alternations with underlying phonemes. 9.2 Alternation types Phonological Alternations come in many shapes and sizes, and the processes behind them are equally varied, as are the kinds of factors which condition them. Consider the following sets of data from English; in what ways do the Alternations represented in (9.2) differ from one another? (9.2) [wɪt] vs. [wĩn] [t h uːɫ] vs. [t h ũːm] ‘i[n]edible, i[n] Edinburgh’ vs. ‘i[m]possible, i[m] Preston’ vs. ‘i[ŋ]conceivable, i[ŋ] Cardiff’ ‘rat[s]’ vs. ‘warthog[z]’ vs. ‘hors[ɪz]’ ‘yak[s]’ vs. ‘bee[z]’ vs. ‘finch[ɪz]’ ‘lea[f]’ vs. ‘lea[v]es’ ‘hou[s]e’ vs. ‘hou[z]es’ ‘electri[k]’ vs. ‘electri[s]ity’ ‘medi[k]al’ vs. ‘medi[s]inal’ In (9.2a), we see an Alternation between purely oral vowel allophones – [ɪ] and [uː] – which occur before an oral segment, and nasalised vowel allophones – [ɪ] ̃ and [ũː] – which occur before a nasal segment. In (9.2b) there is an Alternation between different realisations of the final nasal consonant in both the prefix ‘in-’ and the preposition ‘in’; it agrees in place of articulation with a following labial or velar consonant. In (9.2c) we see different realisations of the plural marker – orthographic ‘(e)s’ – which may be [s], [z] or [ɪz], depending on the nature of the preceding segment. In (9.2d) there is an Alternation in voicing for a root final fricative, voiceless in the singular, voiced in the plural...
eBook - ePubVariationist Sociolinguistics
Change, Observation, Interpretation
- Sali A. Tagliamonte(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...(Foulkes and Docherty 2006: 419) It is not sufficient simply to report that social and linguistic patterns are relevant to a linguistic variable. It is also necessary to understand why. The phenomenon must be explained. So, the question for us at this point is, When you observe variation, what is the linguistic mechanism that underlies it? How do linguistic patterns operate at different levels of grammar to impact linguistic variation and change? For this exploration we must turn to traditional historical linguistics where sound change, analogy, reanalysis, and metaphorical extension are fundamental (see Joseph 2004: 61). Sound Change Perhaps the obvious place to start exploring linguistic patterns is the place where LVC studies started, namely with variation at the level of phonology. The fact that there are different pronunciations for the same word is a straightforward observation. At earlier times this variation was considered decay or laziness. However, in actuality there are mechanical processes underlying these Alternations. In fact, sounds are shifting and changing in the language all the time. Some of the sounds are in the process of change and some of the sounds are variable due simply to mechanistic reasons, such as rate of speech, but there is always a process that underlies them. When someone “drops their g’s,” as in I’m goin’ shoppin’, what is the linguistic mechanism? When someone deletes their t’ s or d’ s what is the underlying process? A number of general mechanisms operate in all languages all over the world. They are persistent, pervasive phonological processes. The most common of them are changes that make pronunciations simpler (Hock 1991: 127). Assimilation, Weakening, Loss Many types of sound change involve simplification and are regularly conditioned sound changes. Perhaps the most widespread is assimilation. This is a process in which sounds within words are influenced by other sounds that surround it...
eBook - ePub- James A. Walker(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 The Analysis of Linguistic Variation 3.0 Introduction The previous chapter laid the groundwork for the analysis of linguistic variation. We defined linguistic variation as “differences in linguistic form without (apparent) changes in meaning”. We also introduced the analytic construct of the variable, which we defined as “different ways (variants) of saying the same thing (the variable context)”. We saw that variables can occur at a number of different linguistic levels: phonetics or phonology, morphology, syntax, the lexicon and discourse. We introduced the principle of accountability, which requires that we examine not only the variant of interest to us but also its relative frequency with respect to all of the other variants of the same variable. In this respect, the definition of the variable context, the place where the speaker has a choice between forms, assumes a central position in the analysis of linguistic variation. How we define the variable context determines which forms we include in the analysis, how we calculate relative frequencies and, ultimately, how we interpret the variation. Although one of our goals is to calculate the overall relative frequency of each variant, more important is determining the contribution made by elements of the (linguistic) context to the choice of each variant. The goal is not to search for categorical distributions of each variant (all vs. nothing), but rather to look for a change in its relative frequency across different contexts (more vs. less). Thus, the analysis of linguistic variation is inherently quantitative and requires recourse to standard statistical procedures, which allow us to determine whether the differences in relative frequencies are meaningful, as well as the relative contribution of each contextual element to the occurrence of a particular variant. In this chapter, we discuss the analysis of linguistic variation in detail...
