British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
The Role of Syllables and Segments in the Soundscape of Languages
Dr Mark Jones
Even though all humans share the same basic speech production and perception capabilities, not all languages sound the same. The principle reason for these cross-linguistic differences is that a single language utilises only a subset of all possible contrastive sounds. However, many sounds do seem to be preferred and recur across languages - almost all languages have some kind of /t/ consonant and an /a/ vowel - and the consonant-vowel (or CV) syllable is also purported to be near universal. Speech researchers seek explanations for these preferences, hypothesising that they reveal something about basic design features for robust communication.
The research reported here examines the way that syllables and individual consonants or vowels (segments) interact in predictable ways to account for certain recurrent sound structures. Data on some Australian languages has suggested that the CV syllable may be dispreferred in languages exhibiting a specific consonant type - retroflexes. Novel experimental data shows that the CV syllable may be less robustly encoded in a language with retroflex consonants (Hindi) than it is in English, but the precise details of the Australian pattern are not replicated. An explanation for the non-replication of the Australian pattern is proposed which focuses on the size of the vowel system, another aspect of segmental sound structure. The complex interaction of syllables and segments appears to produce a continuum of types rather than a strict CV vs. non-CV dichotomy of syllable shapes.
Dr Mark J. Jones completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2005. He is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on explanations for patterns of consonantal variability across languages. His published and forthcoming journal papers cover aspects of the phonetics and phonology of glottalisations, trills, fricatives, and stops.