Sign and signal : deriving linguistic generalizations from information utility
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Why do languages have such different phonological processes even though all speakers share the same cognitive, articulatory and perceptual constraints? American English preserves sounds such as /p/ and /g/ even though they are absent from the sound systems of many of the world's languages, but reduces sounds such as /t/ even though it is one of the most frequently used sounds cross-linguistically. In contrast, Romance languages reduce /s/, which American English preserves. What makes American English have this particular set of phonological processes and not processes that affect other languages? I show that by assuming that speakers attempt to maximize the amount of information they transmit while minimizing the amount of effort required to transmit that information, it is possible to determine which sounds are more likely to be affected by reduction processes and which sounds are more likely to be preserved in each language. Unlike cognitive, perceptual and articulatory constraints, which are the same for speakers of all languages, the amount of information languages assign to linguistic elements, such as individual sounds, varies markedly. The more information a sound carries, the more effort speakers are willing to expend to transmit it faithfully to listeners. The trade-off between maximizing information and minimizing effort forms the basis for a new framework I call MULE (Most information Utility, Least Effort). MULE predicts preservation and reduction patterns in English and Arabic at the levels of performance, competence and change, thereby providing a partial answer to the actuation problem (Weinreich et al. 1968). MULE also predicts cross-linguistic generalizations. I show that in American English, Egyptian Arabic and Spanish, highly informative sounds are more likely to benefit from the perceptual prominence of the onsets of stressed syllables. Similarly the balance between effort and information successfully predicts cross-linguistic asymmetries between the frequencies of less effortful sounds and more effortful sounds. As such, MULE enhances the explanatory power of linguistic theory, and provides a disciplined way to integrate phonetics and information theoretic considerations.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Cohen Priva, Uriel | |
|---|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics | |
| Primary advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- | |
| Thesis advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- | |
| Thesis advisor | Anttila, Arto | |
| Thesis advisor | Kiparsky, Paul | |
| Thesis advisor | Manning, Christopher D | |
| Thesis advisor | Sumner, Meghan | |
| Advisor | Anttila, Arto | |
| Advisor | Kiparsky, Paul | |
| Advisor | Manning, Christopher D | |
| Advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Uriel Cohen Priva. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Uriel Cohen Priva
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
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