- Email: [email protected]
Report on Alexis' dreams—bad as well as good
Journal of Phonetics (1996) 24, 513 – 519
Letter to the Editor Report on Alexis’ dreams—bad as well as good Alexis Manaster Ramer Wayne State Uniy ersity , U .S.A .
Given my abiding regard for phonetics in general, and Dr Port’s work in particular, I am deeply disappointed by his response to my Letter. What I argue in my Letter—in, if anything, excessive detail—is that the work on so-called ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ of word-final voicing in Catalan, German, Russian, and Polish has been inconclusive at best, involving a systematic failure to run the crucial experiments on the crucial forms as well as an equally systematic disregard for both the vast phonetic and the phonological literature dealing with the four languages at issue and the very significant literature devoted to related questions of partial and / or optional neutralization (including the ‘‘near-merger’’ phenomenon) in other languages. Port does not respond to any of this—or to the detailed suggestions I advanced for how, preferably in collaboration with a phonologist who knows how to analyze these languages, an experimental phonetician could hope to remedy these problems and determine once and for all whether ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ exists or not. Instead, Port devotes his reply to refuting three beliefs which he attributes to me, though I do not hold them: (1) that phonology necessarily operates with discrete units, (2) that, if phonology is discrete, then so must phonetics be, and (3) that the incomplete neutralization findings are to be questioned precisely because, if they were right, their nondiscreteness would pose an insuperable problem to these views of phonology and phonetics. This strawman position is what Port describes as ‘‘the theoretical bad dream that concerns AMR’’. But nothing could be further from the truth. The theoretical concern that I raised in my Letter was that, if the advocates of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ were right, then phonologists and phoneticians alike would no longer be able to believe any of the things we think we know about the phonological and phonetic systems of the various languages we have been studying for these many decades. For, as I said, if the reports of complete, total, and utter neutralization in languages as well known as German, Russian, and Polish (Catalan is a separate case) coming down to us from generations, not just of phonologists, but also of the world’s finest phoneticians, are all wrong, then we can surely no longer believe anything without first running the kinds of experiments that Port and his partisans have been doing. Moreover, since their experimental findings have been challenged by other excellent phoneticians (Fourakis & Iverson, 1984; Jassem & Richter, 1989) and no consensus exists to this day among experimentalists, one might wonder whether, in that 0095-4470 / 96 / 040513 1 07 $25.00 / 0
÷ 1996 Academic Press Limited
514
A. Manaster Ramer
situation, it would ever be possible to get straight even the simplest claim of fact about the sound system of any language (or at least to do so in less than a decade or two). This was and is my one and only ‘‘theoretical bad dream’’. I mentioned it in my Letter and bring it up again now, not because I believe that we need to seriously worry about this pessimistic scenario becoming a reality, but because it was and continues to be one of the reasons why I would assume that anybody who cares about either phonetics or phonology would have to be y ery concerned about the incomplete neutralization claims. Of course, I also had, and continue, despite Port’s refusal to bite, to have yet another dream, a practical one and a good one at that: that my Letter might result in a new spirit of cooperation between people who know how to design and run phonetic experiments and those of us who know the languages at issue and the literature on their sound systems, and above all who know how to find in these languages examples crucial to deciding a given phonological issue. For there is one thing we cannot be too emphatic about: the work on ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ in these four languages that has been done to date quite simply fails to address alternative interpretations of the data or to examine the crucial forms which need to be tested before we can say anything about what the facts actually are. As I showed in my Letter, the Catalan work stands out in this regard: it does not just, like the work on the other three languages, ignore many of the relevant facts of the language at issue, but it openly asserts the opposite of what is really the case with regard to Catalan orthography, as well as playing fast and loose with the crucial assumptions about the phonological representations of Catalan examples. But this does not mean that the German, Polish, or Russian work is any more compelling: it still does not prove its case, even though its failings are less severe and that much easier to understand. More work, of a rather straightforward kind, is required to settle the issues, and I have laid out the outline and many of the specifics of such an effort. The reason I am calling for this kind of new work on the problem is simple. Although, as I said at the outset, I would find the prospect of having to do phonology or phonetics in a world in which ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ really existed quite horrific, or at least very nearly impracticable, the issue of whether the word-final devoicing in these languages is ‘‘incomplete’’ in the sense of Port et al. is a factual one. It is of course true that, historically, phonologists have been attracted by the idea of discrete units underlying the stream of speech, as Port points out, although I do not think it true to say that we have imagined that phonetics is equally discrete. Port claims that the discreteness of phonetics is taken as ‘‘ ‘gospel’ by many working phonologists’’, that ‘‘by trusting segmental transcriptions, phonologists run the risk, quite frankly, of building their work on sand’’, and that ‘‘[by] ignoring continuoustime effects, phonologists run the risk of developing theories of the wrong phenomena and of overlooking important language-specific phenomena’’. Port goes on to concede that ‘‘[languages] do exhibit some discrete ‘sound objects’ which cry out for description and explanation’’, but holds that ‘‘these are all phonological objects—linguistic objects —and it is a linguistic theory that must find a way to explain them. Alas, phonetics cannot’’. Here I am really and truly mystified. There may be some phonologists who hold the beliefs Port attributes to us, but I certainly was taught that the whole point of
Report on Alexis ’ dreams
515
phonology was precisely that it allows us to identify this set of ‘‘discrete ‘sound objects’ ’’ which he waxes so eloquent about, and that the whole reason why we need phonology alongside phonetics is precisely that the latter does not. This is not a new or a radical view of things—nor was it new when I was a student. For was it not Sapir (1921: 55) who taught us to contrast ‘‘the purely objective system of sounds that is peculiar to a language and which can be arrived at only by a painstaking phonetic analysis’’ (and which he clearly did not take to be discrete) and ‘‘a more restricted ‘inner’ or ‘ideal’ system’’? And was it not Bloomfield (1933: 85) who insisted: ‘‘Only two kinds of linguistic records are scientifically relevant. One is a mechanical record of the gross acoustic features, such as is produced in the phonetics laboratory. The other is a record in terms of phonemes, ignoring all features that are not distinctive in the language’’. While in practice all of us, including Dr Port, ignore Bloomfield’s ban on phonetic transcription, and while probably all of us, including even the purest-of-heart experimentalist, are liable to be misled by it, I do not think that we have forgotten in the last half-century that it is precisely because phonemes and other such discrete objects cannot be found in the lab that we need phonologists at all, and that phonetic transcription either has no systematic status at all (as Bloomfield held) or, if it does, that it does so only as part of phonology, not of phonetics. For is it not Chomsky & Halle (1968: 294 – 295) who teach that ‘‘phonetic transcription . . . is understood . . . not as a direct record of the speech signal, but rather as a representation of what the speaker of a language takes to be the phonetic properties of an utterance’’, and that, although ‘‘[in] the phonetic transcription an utterance is represented as a sequence of discrete units’’, this is only because ‘‘phonetic transcription consistently disregards many overt physical properties of speech. Among these are phonetic effects that are not locatable in particular segments but rather extend over entire utterances . . . [,] such socially determined aspects of speech as the normal rate of utterance and what has been called by some writers the ‘‘articulation base’’ . . . . In addition, phonetic transcriptions omit properties of the signal that are supplied by universal rules. These properties include, for example, the different articulatory gestures and various coarticulation effects—the transition between a vowel and an adjacent consonant, the adjustment in the vocal tract shape made in anticipation of subsequent motions, etc.’’ Anybody who knows even a little of my work in phonology (e.g., Manaster Ramer 1990, 1992, 1994, in press) knows that there is almost nothing about which I agree with Chomsky & Halle, but on the one point about the difference between the speech signal and any kind of linguistic transcription or representation there seems to me to be no difference between phonologists of all the different schools that exist or have ever existed. On this issue, Chomsky & Halle speak for us all—and what they say seems to me to be no different from what Dr Port says. And so I do not see what it is that he is trying to tell us. It is also important to remember that phonology does not a priori prejudge the issue and assume discreteness as some kind of first principle. The question of just how discrete or nondiscrete various levels of phonological or phonetic representation really are is thus ultimately factual, and I would certainly not be surprised if we
516
A. Manaster Ramer
were to find that phonology is not a stringing together of phoneme sized segments. In fact, it seems to me that phenomena such as diphthongs have already for some time been seen to necessitate a revision of the old-fashioned segmentalist position. We may not yet have a consensus view of what the phonology of the 21st century will look like, but I think it clearly will be a lot less discrete than it used to be, even as recently as 1968. Unfortunately, as far as I know, phonetic research has not been as important in promoting this ongoing change within phonology as it might have been. I will not try to fix the blame for this, but I do believe that in the future phonetics, and especially experimental phonetics, should certainly be able to help us along the way, much as phonologists can, as I have argued, help resolve major issues of phonetics, such as the one of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’. But, although for most of this century we have been used to the idea that phonology is discrete and phonetics is not, there is in principle nothing inherently discrete about phonologists—or nondiscrete about phoneticians. And, there being no conflict in-principle between our points of view, we could learn to listen to each other, and to collaborate. In particular, it is important to realize that the issue of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ is not one of experimental phoneticians y s. speculative, theoretically hidebound, and probably woolly-eared phonologists. This is the way it was posed in the early ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ literature, and this is the way Port still poses it. But it was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It was some very fine experimental phoneticians (such as Jassem and Fourakis) who first challenged the incomplete neutralization findings—and on the other hand, over the course of the century, numerous linguists and grammarians (and not necessarily or even typically experimental phoneticians) have reported numerous cases of less-than-complete neutralizations in various languages (see sample references in my Letter). The issue in the case of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ is thus certainly not phonology y s. phonetics. And it is not even discreteness y s. nondiscreteness. As I discussed in my Letter, the alleged ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ phenomena do not appear to represent a challenge, or at least a new challenge, to the traditional views of phonology and its relation to phonetics. There is nothing in these alleged phenomena which does not appear to be amenable to description by means of neutralization processes that would be variable (i.e., optional to degree x, whatever x may be) and / or partial (i.e., affecting some but not all of the phonetic alias subphonemic features associated with the phonological feature at issue). So, although all phonologists are, I think, very interested in the issue of discreteness y s. nondiscreteness, I do not see that the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ literature tells us anything we did not know before. In fact, this literature does not, in particular, attempt to deal systematically with the question of variation between different registers or between different speakers. As Port himself points out, in the alleged ‘‘near neutralization’’ of / ns / and / nts / in American English, ‘‘[S]peaker idiosyncrasy seems a possibility’’, but surely in such cases we should do more than merely wonder ‘‘who is likely to notice which way a particular speaker implements the ‘neutralization’ ’’. It is precisely this attitude to factual matters which need to be settled by careful investigation but have not been that makes the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ literature as a genre seem as though it takes us a step or two backward compared to other work we have been seeing in phonetics and sociolinguistics for some decades now.
Report on Alexis ’ dreams
517
The real issues, still unresolved, are quite different. The first is whether the facts are as reported by Port et al. or as reported by Fourakis, Jassem et al. , for if the latter are right, then the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ findings are nothing more than an experimental or statistical mirage. Only if the results of Port et al. can be replicated does a second issue arise, namely, whether what they have reported represents evidence of the phonetically real but incomplete realization of a phonological contrast, as they claim, or whether it is something else entirely, e.g., evidence of the existence of spelling pronunciations. The issues were laid out neatly in my Letter, together with specific suggestions for which forms in which language could tell us conclusively which of the various possible hypotheses is right. I am much taken with Port’s detailed discussion of nondiscrete models of human speech, but it does not seem to me that he rises to the challenge I posed in my Letter. How can he ignore the fact that work done by other phoneticians in response to the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ claims about German and Polish failed to replicate the claimed results, and instead insist merely that ‘‘essentially this same observation [of incomplete neutralization in German—AMR] had been independently made in other labs for over 20 years’’? How can he insist, on the basis of work that seems to me highly preliminary in nature and mostly unpublished, that the ‘‘flapping’’ of medial / t / and / d / or the neutralization of / ns / and / nts / in American English are two more definitely established cases of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’? How can he pass over in silence all the detailed suggestions I made of what the really crucial experiments would be? How can he confine the discussion to German (and English, which I do not consider at all comparable) and forget all about Polish, Russian, and especially about the language I consider the most interesting in this context, Catalan? How can he fail to pay attention to the all-important issues of hypercorrect, metalinguistic, and spelling pronunciations raised by Fourakis & Iverson, Jassem & Richter, and in considerable detail by me? Perhaps most troubling, how can he not address the difference I drew so emphatically between work on ‘‘near-mergers’’, which I accept, and ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’, which I question? While ‘‘agree[ing] wholeheartedly with AMR that this effect [5 incomplete neutralization—AMR] is similar to other instances of the ‘‘near-merger’’ of a contrast’’, Port still does not deal with my emphatic insistence on the striking difference between these two genres of linguistic writing and between the two classes of reported phenomena, and hence does not address my reasons for believing the reports of ‘‘near-mergers’’ but disbelieving those of incomplete neutralization. Of course, if he had taken me at my word, he would have noticed that the English flapping phenomenon (if it does not in fact simply involve complete, though not obligatory, neutralization) is one which would fit squarely in the ‘‘near-merger’’ category rather than the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ one. The point is that the literature on English phonology since the 1920s onwards abounds with statements by ear phoneticians and phonologists claiming that there is no neutralization (or at least not a total and obligatory one) in this case (e.g., Bloomfield, 1927; Sapir, 1933). As I said in my Letter, ‘‘incomplete neutralizations’’ have been claimed to exist in cases where generations of the best phoneticians have specifically reported hearing no difference whatever, whereas ‘‘near mergers’’ seem to involve cases where no such reports are on record and where, on the contrary, there are reports that the contrasts were audible to the investigators (though often not to naive speakers). I have had a phonetically naive speaker of American
518
A. Manaster Ramer
English tell me once that the ‘‘flapped’’ / t / in, e.g., butting , was ‘‘a funny kind of d ’’ , distinct from the ‘‘regular d ’’ in, e.g., budding . Whether this is so or not, the fact remains that speakers of Polish, Russian, German, and Catalan (not to mention linguists from those countries), do not report that the final consonant of a word like Bund is ‘‘a funny kind of t ’’. They report instead that pairs like Bund and bunt sound exactly alike. I do not for a moment think that ear phoneticians and phonologists (or, worse yet, native speakers) will always have the last laugh. But in the case of the alleged ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ of final voicing in these four languages, it is surely beginning to look like that. As far as American English flapping is concerned, surely we cannot draw any conclusions yet. Not only is much of the work cited preliminary and unpublished, but no proper analysis of the phonology of the different American dialects has been carried out. The existence of what is clearly a phonemic contrast between different vowels in words like writing y s. riding as well as matter y s. madder in many dialects is just one thing that needs to be sorted out. Port’s reference to the fact that some of his own work indicates complete neutralization of / t / and / d / in some dialects ‘‘except after certain vowel (like [ay])’’ means two things, at least to me. First, all other such work on all American dialects needs to be reexamined very carefully to make sure that reports of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ do not simply involve a statistical mirage due to lumping together of (numerous) instances of complete neutralization and (less numerous) instances of complete distinction of phonemic distinctions in the vowels. Second, the reference to ‘‘[ay]’’, rather than to two quite different phonemic entities, / ay / and / Ey / , raises serious concerns about the adequacy of the phonological analysis of American English. I certainly find it ironic that in this debate, it is the phonologist who keeps calling for more and more careful experimental work to settle the factual questions, while the instrumental phonetician is arguing that ‘‘With isolated words read aloud from a list, [he] find[s] it fairly easy to demonstrate in the classroom that American listeners can guess with better than chance accuracy whether budding or butting was intended (using [him ]self as speaker ’’ [emphasis mine—AMR]. Surely, on reflection, Dr Port will agree with me that we do need more experimental work on all these questions after all. To conclude on a positive note, though, let me call attention to one little piece of consensus that has, perhaps, emerged. Some of the advocates of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ sought to claim that there is no complete neutralization ever in any language. In the original draft of his response to my Letter, Port said he ‘‘do[es] not insist that true neutralization cannot occur’’. However, in the course of 11th hour revisions, this crucial line vanished! I feel morally certain that it was an accidental omission, and that Dr Port will not mind my quoting from his earlier draft and calling attention to this little patch of common ground that we seem to have eked out of this too-long debate. And I earnestly hope he will not be offended that I cannot return the compliment: I do not insist—but I do predict—that ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ does not exist at all, and certainly not in the case of word-final voicing in Catalan, German, Polish, and Russian. Only through joint efforts, such as I have called for, will we ever know for sure. All the issues are factual, and clearly they remain open, since experimental phoneticians themselves continue to disagree. The only reason I thought I should weigh in at all was that neither side seemed to be capable of producing a really
Report on Alexis ’ dreams
519
conclusive account of the facts, and that, frankly, all the phoneticians involved, both those with whom I agree that there is no such thing as ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ and those who agree with Port that there is, seemed to be making the same kinds of mistaken or incomplete claims about the sound systems of the languages at issue. I cannot resist citing Bloomfield (1933: 85) once again, for he went on to say that, despite the availability of those ‘‘mechanical record[s] of the gross acoustic features’’, in reality ‘‘the laboratory phonetician usually knows, from other sources, the phonemic character of the speech-sounds he is studying; he usually formulates his problems not in purely acoustic terms, but rather in terms which he has borrowed from practical phonetics’’. It is these ‘‘other sources’’, the ‘‘practical phonetics’’, for each of the languages at issue (German, Polish, Russian, Catalan, and now also American English) that seem to me to be in more or less dire straits, and requiring the services of someone familiar with the scholarship on the phonetics and phonology of these languages and trained to identify the various intricate problems with fixing the ‘‘phonemic character’’ of the speech sounds Dr Port and his colleagues have been trying to study. This is all that I would like to contribute—and I do not think it is unfair of me to expect in return some solid experimental design and the carrying out of it, so that we can solve these issues. We need no conceptual breakthroughs—and certainly nothing from Rene´ Thom’s arsenal—to tell us how to do such work. All we need is some solid phonology and solid phonetics. So far, although experimental phoneticians continue to disagree about the reality of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’, neither side seems to be able either to settle the factual issues or to deal with the theoretical concern that has haunted me from the beginning, the ‘‘bad dream’’ (should the ‘‘incomplete neutralists’’ be right) of a day when we can no longer trust such simple perceptions as the one that tells us that, for example phonetics and phonology are partly the same and partly different. References Bloomfield, L. (1927) emerikn i1Gli*, Le Maıˆ tre phone´ tique , 3.5, 40 – 42. Bloomfield, L. (1933) Language. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Chomsky, N. & M. Halle (1968) The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row. Fourakis, M. & Iverson, G. K. (1984) On the ‘incomplete neutralization’ of German final obstruents, Phonetica , 41, 140 – 149. Jassem, W. & Richter, L. (1989) Neutralization of voicing in Polish obstruents, Journal of Phonetics , 17, 317 – 325. Manaster Ramer, A. (1990) Sound change vs. rule change: the case of Eastern Andalusian, Folia Linguistica Historica , 8, 385 – 420. Manaster Ramer, A. (1992) The North Korean precursors of generative phonology. In Festschrift for James D. McCawley (D. Brentari, G. N. Larson, & L. A. MacLeod, editors), pp. 213 – 223. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Manaster Ramer, A. (1994) Stefan George and phonological theory, Phonology , 11, 317 – 323. Manaster Ramer, A. (in press) The unreality of morphophonemes in Zambuk Tera sound change, Linguistique africaine. Sapir, E. (1921) Language . New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Sapir, E. (1933) Language. In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , 9, 155 – 169. New York: Macmillan.
Letter to the Editor Report on Alexis’ dreams—bad as well as good Alexis Manaster Ramer Wayne State Uniy ersity , U .S.A .
Given my abiding regard for phonetics in general, and Dr Port’s work in particular, I am deeply disappointed by his response to my Letter. What I argue in my Letter—in, if anything, excessive detail—is that the work on so-called ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ of word-final voicing in Catalan, German, Russian, and Polish has been inconclusive at best, involving a systematic failure to run the crucial experiments on the crucial forms as well as an equally systematic disregard for both the vast phonetic and the phonological literature dealing with the four languages at issue and the very significant literature devoted to related questions of partial and / or optional neutralization (including the ‘‘near-merger’’ phenomenon) in other languages. Port does not respond to any of this—or to the detailed suggestions I advanced for how, preferably in collaboration with a phonologist who knows how to analyze these languages, an experimental phonetician could hope to remedy these problems and determine once and for all whether ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ exists or not. Instead, Port devotes his reply to refuting three beliefs which he attributes to me, though I do not hold them: (1) that phonology necessarily operates with discrete units, (2) that, if phonology is discrete, then so must phonetics be, and (3) that the incomplete neutralization findings are to be questioned precisely because, if they were right, their nondiscreteness would pose an insuperable problem to these views of phonology and phonetics. This strawman position is what Port describes as ‘‘the theoretical bad dream that concerns AMR’’. But nothing could be further from the truth. The theoretical concern that I raised in my Letter was that, if the advocates of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ were right, then phonologists and phoneticians alike would no longer be able to believe any of the things we think we know about the phonological and phonetic systems of the various languages we have been studying for these many decades. For, as I said, if the reports of complete, total, and utter neutralization in languages as well known as German, Russian, and Polish (Catalan is a separate case) coming down to us from generations, not just of phonologists, but also of the world’s finest phoneticians, are all wrong, then we can surely no longer believe anything without first running the kinds of experiments that Port and his partisans have been doing. Moreover, since their experimental findings have been challenged by other excellent phoneticians (Fourakis & Iverson, 1984; Jassem & Richter, 1989) and no consensus exists to this day among experimentalists, one might wonder whether, in that 0095-4470 / 96 / 040513 1 07 $25.00 / 0
÷ 1996 Academic Press Limited
514
A. Manaster Ramer
situation, it would ever be possible to get straight even the simplest claim of fact about the sound system of any language (or at least to do so in less than a decade or two). This was and is my one and only ‘‘theoretical bad dream’’. I mentioned it in my Letter and bring it up again now, not because I believe that we need to seriously worry about this pessimistic scenario becoming a reality, but because it was and continues to be one of the reasons why I would assume that anybody who cares about either phonetics or phonology would have to be y ery concerned about the incomplete neutralization claims. Of course, I also had, and continue, despite Port’s refusal to bite, to have yet another dream, a practical one and a good one at that: that my Letter might result in a new spirit of cooperation between people who know how to design and run phonetic experiments and those of us who know the languages at issue and the literature on their sound systems, and above all who know how to find in these languages examples crucial to deciding a given phonological issue. For there is one thing we cannot be too emphatic about: the work on ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ in these four languages that has been done to date quite simply fails to address alternative interpretations of the data or to examine the crucial forms which need to be tested before we can say anything about what the facts actually are. As I showed in my Letter, the Catalan work stands out in this regard: it does not just, like the work on the other three languages, ignore many of the relevant facts of the language at issue, but it openly asserts the opposite of what is really the case with regard to Catalan orthography, as well as playing fast and loose with the crucial assumptions about the phonological representations of Catalan examples. But this does not mean that the German, Polish, or Russian work is any more compelling: it still does not prove its case, even though its failings are less severe and that much easier to understand. More work, of a rather straightforward kind, is required to settle the issues, and I have laid out the outline and many of the specifics of such an effort. The reason I am calling for this kind of new work on the problem is simple. Although, as I said at the outset, I would find the prospect of having to do phonology or phonetics in a world in which ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ really existed quite horrific, or at least very nearly impracticable, the issue of whether the word-final devoicing in these languages is ‘‘incomplete’’ in the sense of Port et al. is a factual one. It is of course true that, historically, phonologists have been attracted by the idea of discrete units underlying the stream of speech, as Port points out, although I do not think it true to say that we have imagined that phonetics is equally discrete. Port claims that the discreteness of phonetics is taken as ‘‘ ‘gospel’ by many working phonologists’’, that ‘‘by trusting segmental transcriptions, phonologists run the risk, quite frankly, of building their work on sand’’, and that ‘‘[by] ignoring continuoustime effects, phonologists run the risk of developing theories of the wrong phenomena and of overlooking important language-specific phenomena’’. Port goes on to concede that ‘‘[languages] do exhibit some discrete ‘sound objects’ which cry out for description and explanation’’, but holds that ‘‘these are all phonological objects—linguistic objects —and it is a linguistic theory that must find a way to explain them. Alas, phonetics cannot’’. Here I am really and truly mystified. There may be some phonologists who hold the beliefs Port attributes to us, but I certainly was taught that the whole point of
Report on Alexis ’ dreams
515
phonology was precisely that it allows us to identify this set of ‘‘discrete ‘sound objects’ ’’ which he waxes so eloquent about, and that the whole reason why we need phonology alongside phonetics is precisely that the latter does not. This is not a new or a radical view of things—nor was it new when I was a student. For was it not Sapir (1921: 55) who taught us to contrast ‘‘the purely objective system of sounds that is peculiar to a language and which can be arrived at only by a painstaking phonetic analysis’’ (and which he clearly did not take to be discrete) and ‘‘a more restricted ‘inner’ or ‘ideal’ system’’? And was it not Bloomfield (1933: 85) who insisted: ‘‘Only two kinds of linguistic records are scientifically relevant. One is a mechanical record of the gross acoustic features, such as is produced in the phonetics laboratory. The other is a record in terms of phonemes, ignoring all features that are not distinctive in the language’’. While in practice all of us, including Dr Port, ignore Bloomfield’s ban on phonetic transcription, and while probably all of us, including even the purest-of-heart experimentalist, are liable to be misled by it, I do not think that we have forgotten in the last half-century that it is precisely because phonemes and other such discrete objects cannot be found in the lab that we need phonologists at all, and that phonetic transcription either has no systematic status at all (as Bloomfield held) or, if it does, that it does so only as part of phonology, not of phonetics. For is it not Chomsky & Halle (1968: 294 – 295) who teach that ‘‘phonetic transcription . . . is understood . . . not as a direct record of the speech signal, but rather as a representation of what the speaker of a language takes to be the phonetic properties of an utterance’’, and that, although ‘‘[in] the phonetic transcription an utterance is represented as a sequence of discrete units’’, this is only because ‘‘phonetic transcription consistently disregards many overt physical properties of speech. Among these are phonetic effects that are not locatable in particular segments but rather extend over entire utterances . . . [,] such socially determined aspects of speech as the normal rate of utterance and what has been called by some writers the ‘‘articulation base’’ . . . . In addition, phonetic transcriptions omit properties of the signal that are supplied by universal rules. These properties include, for example, the different articulatory gestures and various coarticulation effects—the transition between a vowel and an adjacent consonant, the adjustment in the vocal tract shape made in anticipation of subsequent motions, etc.’’ Anybody who knows even a little of my work in phonology (e.g., Manaster Ramer 1990, 1992, 1994, in press) knows that there is almost nothing about which I agree with Chomsky & Halle, but on the one point about the difference between the speech signal and any kind of linguistic transcription or representation there seems to me to be no difference between phonologists of all the different schools that exist or have ever existed. On this issue, Chomsky & Halle speak for us all—and what they say seems to me to be no different from what Dr Port says. And so I do not see what it is that he is trying to tell us. It is also important to remember that phonology does not a priori prejudge the issue and assume discreteness as some kind of first principle. The question of just how discrete or nondiscrete various levels of phonological or phonetic representation really are is thus ultimately factual, and I would certainly not be surprised if we
516
A. Manaster Ramer
were to find that phonology is not a stringing together of phoneme sized segments. In fact, it seems to me that phenomena such as diphthongs have already for some time been seen to necessitate a revision of the old-fashioned segmentalist position. We may not yet have a consensus view of what the phonology of the 21st century will look like, but I think it clearly will be a lot less discrete than it used to be, even as recently as 1968. Unfortunately, as far as I know, phonetic research has not been as important in promoting this ongoing change within phonology as it might have been. I will not try to fix the blame for this, but I do believe that in the future phonetics, and especially experimental phonetics, should certainly be able to help us along the way, much as phonologists can, as I have argued, help resolve major issues of phonetics, such as the one of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’. But, although for most of this century we have been used to the idea that phonology is discrete and phonetics is not, there is in principle nothing inherently discrete about phonologists—or nondiscrete about phoneticians. And, there being no conflict in-principle between our points of view, we could learn to listen to each other, and to collaborate. In particular, it is important to realize that the issue of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ is not one of experimental phoneticians y s. speculative, theoretically hidebound, and probably woolly-eared phonologists. This is the way it was posed in the early ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ literature, and this is the way Port still poses it. But it was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It was some very fine experimental phoneticians (such as Jassem and Fourakis) who first challenged the incomplete neutralization findings—and on the other hand, over the course of the century, numerous linguists and grammarians (and not necessarily or even typically experimental phoneticians) have reported numerous cases of less-than-complete neutralizations in various languages (see sample references in my Letter). The issue in the case of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ is thus certainly not phonology y s. phonetics. And it is not even discreteness y s. nondiscreteness. As I discussed in my Letter, the alleged ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ phenomena do not appear to represent a challenge, or at least a new challenge, to the traditional views of phonology and its relation to phonetics. There is nothing in these alleged phenomena which does not appear to be amenable to description by means of neutralization processes that would be variable (i.e., optional to degree x, whatever x may be) and / or partial (i.e., affecting some but not all of the phonetic alias subphonemic features associated with the phonological feature at issue). So, although all phonologists are, I think, very interested in the issue of discreteness y s. nondiscreteness, I do not see that the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ literature tells us anything we did not know before. In fact, this literature does not, in particular, attempt to deal systematically with the question of variation between different registers or between different speakers. As Port himself points out, in the alleged ‘‘near neutralization’’ of / ns / and / nts / in American English, ‘‘[S]peaker idiosyncrasy seems a possibility’’, but surely in such cases we should do more than merely wonder ‘‘who is likely to notice which way a particular speaker implements the ‘neutralization’ ’’. It is precisely this attitude to factual matters which need to be settled by careful investigation but have not been that makes the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ literature as a genre seem as though it takes us a step or two backward compared to other work we have been seeing in phonetics and sociolinguistics for some decades now.
Report on Alexis ’ dreams
517
The real issues, still unresolved, are quite different. The first is whether the facts are as reported by Port et al. or as reported by Fourakis, Jassem et al. , for if the latter are right, then the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ findings are nothing more than an experimental or statistical mirage. Only if the results of Port et al. can be replicated does a second issue arise, namely, whether what they have reported represents evidence of the phonetically real but incomplete realization of a phonological contrast, as they claim, or whether it is something else entirely, e.g., evidence of the existence of spelling pronunciations. The issues were laid out neatly in my Letter, together with specific suggestions for which forms in which language could tell us conclusively which of the various possible hypotheses is right. I am much taken with Port’s detailed discussion of nondiscrete models of human speech, but it does not seem to me that he rises to the challenge I posed in my Letter. How can he ignore the fact that work done by other phoneticians in response to the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ claims about German and Polish failed to replicate the claimed results, and instead insist merely that ‘‘essentially this same observation [of incomplete neutralization in German—AMR] had been independently made in other labs for over 20 years’’? How can he insist, on the basis of work that seems to me highly preliminary in nature and mostly unpublished, that the ‘‘flapping’’ of medial / t / and / d / or the neutralization of / ns / and / nts / in American English are two more definitely established cases of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’? How can he pass over in silence all the detailed suggestions I made of what the really crucial experiments would be? How can he confine the discussion to German (and English, which I do not consider at all comparable) and forget all about Polish, Russian, and especially about the language I consider the most interesting in this context, Catalan? How can he fail to pay attention to the all-important issues of hypercorrect, metalinguistic, and spelling pronunciations raised by Fourakis & Iverson, Jassem & Richter, and in considerable detail by me? Perhaps most troubling, how can he not address the difference I drew so emphatically between work on ‘‘near-mergers’’, which I accept, and ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’, which I question? While ‘‘agree[ing] wholeheartedly with AMR that this effect [5 incomplete neutralization—AMR] is similar to other instances of the ‘‘near-merger’’ of a contrast’’, Port still does not deal with my emphatic insistence on the striking difference between these two genres of linguistic writing and between the two classes of reported phenomena, and hence does not address my reasons for believing the reports of ‘‘near-mergers’’ but disbelieving those of incomplete neutralization. Of course, if he had taken me at my word, he would have noticed that the English flapping phenomenon (if it does not in fact simply involve complete, though not obligatory, neutralization) is one which would fit squarely in the ‘‘near-merger’’ category rather than the ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ one. The point is that the literature on English phonology since the 1920s onwards abounds with statements by ear phoneticians and phonologists claiming that there is no neutralization (or at least not a total and obligatory one) in this case (e.g., Bloomfield, 1927; Sapir, 1933). As I said in my Letter, ‘‘incomplete neutralizations’’ have been claimed to exist in cases where generations of the best phoneticians have specifically reported hearing no difference whatever, whereas ‘‘near mergers’’ seem to involve cases where no such reports are on record and where, on the contrary, there are reports that the contrasts were audible to the investigators (though often not to naive speakers). I have had a phonetically naive speaker of American
518
A. Manaster Ramer
English tell me once that the ‘‘flapped’’ / t / in, e.g., butting , was ‘‘a funny kind of d ’’ , distinct from the ‘‘regular d ’’ in, e.g., budding . Whether this is so or not, the fact remains that speakers of Polish, Russian, German, and Catalan (not to mention linguists from those countries), do not report that the final consonant of a word like Bund is ‘‘a funny kind of t ’’. They report instead that pairs like Bund and bunt sound exactly alike. I do not for a moment think that ear phoneticians and phonologists (or, worse yet, native speakers) will always have the last laugh. But in the case of the alleged ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ of final voicing in these four languages, it is surely beginning to look like that. As far as American English flapping is concerned, surely we cannot draw any conclusions yet. Not only is much of the work cited preliminary and unpublished, but no proper analysis of the phonology of the different American dialects has been carried out. The existence of what is clearly a phonemic contrast between different vowels in words like writing y s. riding as well as matter y s. madder in many dialects is just one thing that needs to be sorted out. Port’s reference to the fact that some of his own work indicates complete neutralization of / t / and / d / in some dialects ‘‘except after certain vowel (like [ay])’’ means two things, at least to me. First, all other such work on all American dialects needs to be reexamined very carefully to make sure that reports of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ do not simply involve a statistical mirage due to lumping together of (numerous) instances of complete neutralization and (less numerous) instances of complete distinction of phonemic distinctions in the vowels. Second, the reference to ‘‘[ay]’’, rather than to two quite different phonemic entities, / ay / and / Ey / , raises serious concerns about the adequacy of the phonological analysis of American English. I certainly find it ironic that in this debate, it is the phonologist who keeps calling for more and more careful experimental work to settle the factual questions, while the instrumental phonetician is arguing that ‘‘With isolated words read aloud from a list, [he] find[s] it fairly easy to demonstrate in the classroom that American listeners can guess with better than chance accuracy whether budding or butting was intended (using [him ]self as speaker ’’ [emphasis mine—AMR]. Surely, on reflection, Dr Port will agree with me that we do need more experimental work on all these questions after all. To conclude on a positive note, though, let me call attention to one little piece of consensus that has, perhaps, emerged. Some of the advocates of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ sought to claim that there is no complete neutralization ever in any language. In the original draft of his response to my Letter, Port said he ‘‘do[es] not insist that true neutralization cannot occur’’. However, in the course of 11th hour revisions, this crucial line vanished! I feel morally certain that it was an accidental omission, and that Dr Port will not mind my quoting from his earlier draft and calling attention to this little patch of common ground that we seem to have eked out of this too-long debate. And I earnestly hope he will not be offended that I cannot return the compliment: I do not insist—but I do predict—that ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ does not exist at all, and certainly not in the case of word-final voicing in Catalan, German, Polish, and Russian. Only through joint efforts, such as I have called for, will we ever know for sure. All the issues are factual, and clearly they remain open, since experimental phoneticians themselves continue to disagree. The only reason I thought I should weigh in at all was that neither side seemed to be capable of producing a really
Report on Alexis ’ dreams
519
conclusive account of the facts, and that, frankly, all the phoneticians involved, both those with whom I agree that there is no such thing as ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’ and those who agree with Port that there is, seemed to be making the same kinds of mistaken or incomplete claims about the sound systems of the languages at issue. I cannot resist citing Bloomfield (1933: 85) once again, for he went on to say that, despite the availability of those ‘‘mechanical record[s] of the gross acoustic features’’, in reality ‘‘the laboratory phonetician usually knows, from other sources, the phonemic character of the speech-sounds he is studying; he usually formulates his problems not in purely acoustic terms, but rather in terms which he has borrowed from practical phonetics’’. It is these ‘‘other sources’’, the ‘‘practical phonetics’’, for each of the languages at issue (German, Polish, Russian, Catalan, and now also American English) that seem to me to be in more or less dire straits, and requiring the services of someone familiar with the scholarship on the phonetics and phonology of these languages and trained to identify the various intricate problems with fixing the ‘‘phonemic character’’ of the speech sounds Dr Port and his colleagues have been trying to study. This is all that I would like to contribute—and I do not think it is unfair of me to expect in return some solid experimental design and the carrying out of it, so that we can solve these issues. We need no conceptual breakthroughs—and certainly nothing from Rene´ Thom’s arsenal—to tell us how to do such work. All we need is some solid phonology and solid phonetics. So far, although experimental phoneticians continue to disagree about the reality of ‘‘incomplete neutralization’’, neither side seems to be able either to settle the factual issues or to deal with the theoretical concern that has haunted me from the beginning, the ‘‘bad dream’’ (should the ‘‘incomplete neutralists’’ be right) of a day when we can no longer trust such simple perceptions as the one that tells us that, for example phonetics and phonology are partly the same and partly different. References Bloomfield, L. (1927) emerikn i1Gli*, Le Maıˆ tre phone´ tique , 3.5, 40 – 42. Bloomfield, L. (1933) Language. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Chomsky, N. & M. Halle (1968) The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row. Fourakis, M. & Iverson, G. K. (1984) On the ‘incomplete neutralization’ of German final obstruents, Phonetica , 41, 140 – 149. Jassem, W. & Richter, L. (1989) Neutralization of voicing in Polish obstruents, Journal of Phonetics , 17, 317 – 325. Manaster Ramer, A. (1990) Sound change vs. rule change: the case of Eastern Andalusian, Folia Linguistica Historica , 8, 385 – 420. Manaster Ramer, A. (1992) The North Korean precursors of generative phonology. In Festschrift for James D. McCawley (D. Brentari, G. N. Larson, & L. A. MacLeod, editors), pp. 213 – 223. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Manaster Ramer, A. (1994) Stefan George and phonological theory, Phonology , 11, 317 – 323. Manaster Ramer, A. (in press) The unreality of morphophonemes in Zambuk Tera sound change, Linguistique africaine. Sapir, E. (1921) Language . New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Sapir, E. (1933) Language. In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , 9, 155 – 169. New York: Macmillan.