Author: mmyama

Oceanic Linguistics

Volume 60, Number 20 (2021)

This new issue contains a squib titled, “Three Puzzles for Phonological Theory in Philippine Minority Languages” by Jason W. Lobel, Robert Blust, and Erik Thomas.

An excerpt from this squib reads as follows:

In viewing language as an object of scientific inquiry, description alone has never been enough to satisfy most researchers. Once observations about one language are compared with those about another, there is a desire to generalize, to make statements about what is common and what is not, and therefore about what is expected and what is surprising in language content, structure, or change. In terms of theory construction, expected observations follow from basic assumptions about how language works and how it is embedded in the larger context of human neurophysiology and behavior. Much progress has been made in recent decades concerning the phonetic forces that give rise to phonological processes, and there is widespread agreement about many of these. This note describes three well-documented phonological processes in languages spoken by aboriginal Filipino populations along the Pacific coast of Luzon that do not conform to current theoretical expectations about what is a likely or even a possible diachronic process. Each of these is part of a larger context of sound change which does conform to theoretical expectation, although the details are complex, and still not widely reported in the literature. For this reason, a brief background survey of vocalic changes triggered by voiced stops will be given first, followed by the puzzling changes that depart from this more general pattern.

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