This study is a contribution to Correspondence Theory (McCarthy and Prince
1995): it seeks to provide empirical evidence for the proposition that correspondence
constraints are context-dependent and that their rankings are partly predictable
from perceived similarity relations among different string types (Steriade 2001,
in Hume and Johnson eds.). For many phonological processes, the exact division
of labor between markedness and correspondence constraints is uncertain: the
same process can frequently be described as the interaction of context-free
correspondence with context sensitive markedness constraints or, alternatively,
as the interaction between context-free markedness with context sensitive correspondence.
One can make progress in resolving this type of ambiguity by focussing on phenomena
where markedness plays no role and similarity alone determines the empirical
outcome. With this in mind I study imperfect rimes (semi-rimes, SR): the starting
assumption being that the poet's observed preference for one SR type over another
reflects the poet's judgment that the better SR's involve more similar strings
and thus a rhyming pair closer to perfect identity. Relative similarity will
be reflected in correspondence rankings: if Corr1 >> Corr2 (where Corr1
and Corr2 are distinct correspondence constraints evaluating the identity between
the rhyme domains of two lines) then a pair of lines violating Corr1 will be,
all else equal, less harmonic and thus dispreferred to a pair violating Corr2.
The talk examines SR distributions in modern (19th-20th centuries) Romanian
poetry. Romanian is selected because its frequent feminine rhymes allow us to
examine the relative distribution of SR's based on the same feature in a wide
variety of contexts. I review three sources of SR evidence (rhymed translations,
native poetry, and a rhyme dictionary written by a poet for his own use) which
converge on identifying those SR types that are both frequent in individual
SR corpora and documented across all SR corpora. To evaluate the relative frequency
of different SR types I compare, within a given corpus, the ratio of all rhymes
containing a certain feature (say obstruent voicing) to SR's based on mismatches
of this feature (e.g. SR's involving differences of obstruent voicing).
The immediate goals of the project are to determine whether changes of context
induce different evaluations of phonological similarity and, if so, whether
the different evaluations of similarity are tied to phonetic, context-dependent
differences in the realization of the relevant features or to other factors.
The interest in the possibility of context-dependent similarity is directly
tied to the debate between the proponents of positional (i.e. context sensitive)
markedness and those supporting positional correspondence. I argue that the
latter conditions are necessary by observing that positional correspondence
conditions must be operative in the analysis of rhyming.
The following is one example of the evidence I analyze. I use the formula D(x-y)
to refer to the phonological distance or dissimilarity between two rhyme domains
differentiated by the strings x and y and the formula D(x-y) < D (x-z) to
abbreviate assertions of the form "the dissimilarity between x and y is
less than that between x and z". The evidence for these assertions is the
relative frequency of corresponding SR types in our corpora: our assumption
is that more frequent SR's are those judged to involve more similar rhyme domains.
(Abbreviations: T: voiceless obstruent, D: voiced obstruent, N: nasal, V vowel,
# end of word; rhyme domains are underlined in the examples.)
D (-NT#)-(ND#) < D (-NTV)-(NDV) < D (-VT#)-(VD#) < D (-VTV)-(VDV)
For instance, the SR type timp-skimb (based on the difference (-NT#)-(ND#))
is more frequent that the SR-type púnte-askúnde, which is in turn
significantly less frequent than the type vød-føt. The type skáde-láte
occurs but is least frequent. I interpret this result as indicating that voicing
differences are perceived as least distinctive in post-nasal, word final stops,
more so in prevocalic and postvocalic position. An acoustic study of Romanian
stop voicing, carried out in collaboration with Jie Zhang, reveals the existence
of gradient post-nasal voicing in Romanian, a possible source of the greater
perceived similarity between T-D in the post-N context.
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