MARCS Research Seminar

Prof San Duanmu, University of Michigan and Visiting Professor at the MARCS Institute will be presenting "Sounds and Features in the World’s Languages"

Abstract

In this talk I address a fundamental question in phonology: What features are needed to distinguish all speech sounds in the world’s languages? The question itself raises several other questions. What are speech sounds? What are features and how are they determined? Do we have adequate data for the task? Can we compare sounds and features across languages? How do we account for potential sounds not in our data? I shall discuss different views on these questions. Then I demonstrate how empirical evidence can be gathered from large phoneme inventory corpora (e.g. UPSID and P-Base) to evaluate current views, or to invite new ones. In particular, I shall examine the maximal number of contrasts in each phonetic dimension and show that (a) there are far fewer distinct vowels and consonants than previously assumed and (b) the resulting feature theory is much simpler than previously conceived.