Pushing the boundaries: marginal phonemes and dialogic interaction

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Pushing the boundaries: Marginal phonemes and dialogic interaction

Nicholas Evans

Abstract

Phonemes with restricted distribution represent an interesting analytic challenge. Well-known sources include the adoption of certain phonemes from other languages in borrowed words, emerging phonemic splits, and special phonological subsystems (e.g. ideophones). This paper aims to widen our conception of such marginal phonemes, by incorporating another source: specific vocal gestures called into play in interactional settings. Our initial puzzle involves a restricted phoneme set in the Papuan language Nen: two classes of sounds are restricted to interactive contexts, namely interjections and deictics. These sounds are the nasal vowels a, e, and the glottal fricative h. Several questions arise here. Should these restricted sounds be considered part of the phoneme system?

How did they evolve? How does their presence interact with seemingly equivalent sounds in neighbouring languages, in contexts of possible loanwords? We then pass to two other languages where sounds that are unquestionably phonemes have, in at least some phonotactic positions, clear correlations with interactive uses: initial /6/ in English, essentially restricted to words of person (thou), space (that), time (then), or discourse deixis (the, though), and glottal stops with morphemic function in Bininj Kunwok, restricted to immediate aspect¹, addressee-engaged demonstratives, and kinship vocatives. It is already known that non-phonemic speech sounds (e.g. what is written mhm in English) are used in interaction. This paper proposes that the special phonetics of interaction can integrate further into the sound system and, in such cases as those presented here, either expand the phonological system in absolute terms by adding new phonemes, or expand the phonotactic possibilities of phonemes already occurring in other phonotactic positions.

Keywords: marginal phonemes, Nen, Bininj Kunwok, voiced dental fricatives, restricted phonemes, phonologisation.

Аннотация

Раздвигая границы: Фонемы с ограниченной дистрибуцией и диалогическое взаимодействие

Николас Эванс

Исследование фонем с ограниченной дистрибуцией - это интересная аналитическая задача. Хорошо известные источники включают усвоение определенных фонем из других языков в заимствованных словах, возникающее расщепление фонем и специальные фонологические подсистемы (например, идеофоны). Цель этой статьи - расширить наши представления о такого рода фонемах с ограниченной дистрибуцией посредством привлечения других источников: специфических вокальных жестов, возникающих в условиях интеракции. Наша первая проблема связана с набором ограниченных фонем в папуасском языке нен: два вида звуков ограничены интерактивными контекстами, а именно междометиями и дейктическими словами. К ним относятся назальные гласные а, ё, а также глоттальный фрикативный согласный h.

Здесь возникают некоторые вопросы. Следует ли считать эти фонемы с ограниченной дистрибуцией частью фонематической системы? Как они возникли? Как они взаимодействуют в составе заимствований со звуками соседних языков, кажущимися эквивалентными? Затем мы переходим к двум другим языкам, где звуки, несомненно являющиеся фонемами, имеют, по меньшей мере, в некоторых фонотактических позициях явные взаимосвязи с интерактивным использованием: начальное /б/ в английском языке, которое существенно ограничено словами, выражающими лицо (thou), пространство (that), время (then) или дискурсивным дейксисом (the, though), и морфемный твердый приступ в австралийских языках гунвиньгу, позиционное употребление которого ограничено формами глагола «непосредственного аспекта» «Непосредственный аспект» указывает на то, что событие разворачивается здесь и сейчас. В языках гунвиньгу отсутствует форма настоящего времени (используется общее «непрошедшее»). Хотя в некоторых случаях можно было бы говорить о настоящем времени, термин «непосредственный аспект» является более точным, так как привлекает внимание к непосредственности ситуации., также указывающими на адресата демонстративами и терминами родства в функции вокативов. Уже известно, что в коммуникации используются нефонематические звуки речи (например, обозначаемые как mhm в английском языке). В статье высказывается мысль о том, что интерактивная фонетика может в дальнейшем интегрироваться в звуковую систему и в случаях, подобных описанным, либо расширять фонологическую систему за счет включения в нее новых фонем, либо расширять фонотактические возможности фонем, встречающихся в других фонотактических позициях.

Ключевые слова: фонемы с ограниченной дистирибуцией, нен, яхыки гунвиньгу, звонкие зубные фрикативы, фонологизация

Dedication

With this modest offering I pay tribute to Igor Aleksandrovic as a mentor, friend, inspiration and mensch. Igor was asked to visit the Australian National University in the early 1980s when I was just beginning my linguistic studies, taking up an invitation by Anna Wierzbicka. He taught a course on Meaning Text Linguistics which I had the good fortune to attend, and which offered a completely different perspective on how to integrate meaning into grammatical description, particularly at the interface between lexicon, meaning and syntax. He made a deep impression on a group of us who were just starting out on our careers as linguists. Quite apart from his linguistic work, including a crucial article (Melchuk 1979) that led Australianist linguists like Cliff Goddard (1982) to argue for a significantly different analysis of Australian case systems he mesmerised us as a larger-than-life figure. A memorable example was his lunchtime talk to the Linguistics Students Association on `Why I am a linguist in Montreal and not in Moscow', whose Tolstoyan dimensions left the succeeding speaker (the late Michael Silverstein) standing waiting for the seminar room to become free until in desperation he began his own seminar in the corridor. Equally memorable were his inexhaustible repertoire of jokes, his complete independence of thought on all topics, and his love of cross-country skiing, a passion he shared with David Wilkins and myself in the Snowy Mountains. These deep impressions led to him being invited back to Australia a number of times, greatly enriching the linguistic scene here.

In these mad times, when his beloved Odessa lives in the shadow of a senseless war, one of his replies during a seminar on Meaning-Text Theory sticks in my mind. He had spent the whole seminar tracing the whole derivation of a sentence (I forget which) from the level of a meaning network to its linear surface form. Bob Dixon, though willing to concede that this example had worked, felt the urge to ask him something along the lines of: `that's all very well, but not all speakers would accept this form. How do you deal with speakers who might disagree?' With a twinkle in his eye, Igor replied `My solution is simple, and characteristically Soviet: I shoot them!' In another episode he told us about how during his time doing Soviet military service he managed to earn the right for him and his company to keep hidden the mufti they needed to go out at nights incognito. In competition with three swearing army sergeants, renowned for their mastery of swearing (мат), he compiled and memorised a vast combinatoric table of obscene linguistic elements and used it to outlast his rival in a competition to see who could swear the longest without repeating themselves: `My soulless, inhuman technique vanquished these inspired intuitive masters' (email from IM to author, 18/1/2018).

Igor, I could never associate the words `soulless' or `inhuman' with you, and however much you try to remain in the realm of technique you cannot escape being inspired and intuitive!

So happy birthday, dear friend and teacher!

Introduction

Igor Melchuk chose, as an opening quote to one of his many masterpieces, the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary of Modern Russian (Melchuk & Zholkovsky 1984: 34, 38), the following lines from Vladimir Nabokov:

Table 1

This awareness of what lies beyond the boundaries is typical Mel'cukian paradox, since one of the hallmarks of Igor's work has always been to neatly delimit a set of phenomena and then to investigate them with ruthless rigor. The present offering explores one such delimitation, and also pushes the boundaries in terms of how this current special issue is conceived. It is not about Meaning Text Theory, though it does explore one corner of the Linguistic Universe and at least touches on a phenomenon close to what Iordanskaja and Melchuk (2017) call `pragmatemes'. And, vast as the range of topics which Igor has tackled in his lifetime, it does not to my knowledge treat a topic he has written about. Nonetheless, at least from the point of view of this author it reflects two ways in which my own work has been inspired by his.

Firstly, his interest in the application of `calculi of possibilities' to exploring the design space of possible linguistic phenomena, something he has advocated and employed widely (see e.g. Melchuk 2006). It was through my interactions with Igor that I realised that while many linguists with intellectual roots in the Englishspeaking world unconsciously take Darwin's induction from the sprawling jungle of natural organisms as the relevant scientific paradigm, for many from the Russianspeaking tradition it is rather Mendeleev who is the `type scientist', with his demonstration of how apparent gaps in the `calculus of possibilities' (in his case, the periodic table of elements) can be filled if we look in the right places.

Secondly, I was always struck by the following puzzle. While Igor's professional interests in linguistics rarely if ever focused on interaction, conversation or pragmatics, he is in fact one of the most interactive people I have ever met, drawing an enchanted and intense circle around all sorts of people who come into contact with him. I hope that by the end of this article the connection between these two points and the topic I examine here will become apparent.

Here, then, is the problem we pose in this contribution: how do we deal with putative phonemes which appear to be confined to words found only in interactional settings? And what are the means by which they arise?

Determining the number of phonemes in a language is a fundamental and heuristically initial problem in the study of any language. But this is often a less simple question than it appears, because of the existence of what are often called `marginal' phonemes. And phonemes may be marginal for many reasons. They may be confined to loanwords (like English /ж/ in French scanner /sk^ne/ `to scan', or /x/ in the pronunciation of Arabic loanwords in the Indonesian of some (predominantly Muslim) speakers, like /xabar/ <kabar ~ khabar> `news'). Or they may be limited (either absolutely, or in terms of particular phonotactic positions) to onomatopoeic or ideophonic words. In Kisi, for example (Childs 1988: 172-173) the particular properties of ideophone phoneme inventories include allowing word- initial labial-velar stops (/gb/), as in /gbolung-gbolung/ `ringing, switching', a specially raised and lengthened nasal vowel /а/, word-final voiceless vowels, and the presence of a schwa phoneme. And in Nungon (Sarvasy 2016) word-initial consonant clusters like kr and br only occur in `warblish' - ideophonic imitations of birdsong. The case that interests us here, though, constitutes a third type, which to my knowledge has not been examined in the literature: I distinguish cases like those we will be discussing, where interactionally-derived sounds behave like phonemes, in the sense of combining with other phonemes to build morphemes and words, from the use of non-combining sounds for interactional purposes. Dingemanse et al. (2013), in their discussion of the sound approximated in their article as `huh?', is one such case; others are e.g. the use of the reduplicated dental click to express disapproval in English (variously rendered tut-tut or tsk-tsk in English orthography), or the use of /(only in the word fa) to shoo away dogs in a number of languages of Anhem Land (e.g. Bininj Kunwok) which lack fricatives in their normal phoneme inventory. While broadly relevant to the argument advanced here, in the sense of showing how interaction calls forth a wider palette of sounds than those on the regular phonemic inventory, they differ because of their lack of combinatoric options. the existence of phonemes that are confined, either absolutely or in particular phonotactic environments, to interactional contexts.

We begin by examining the phenomenon in Nen (§2), the language where I was most clearly forced to confront the phenomenon. I then pass to some other languages - Bininj Kunwok and Dalabon in northern Australia (§3), but also, less exotically, English (§4), before concluding in §5. It is not my goal to explore the phenomenon across the world's languages - a vast undertaking that would burst the bounds of my allocated space - but to draw attention to the phenomenon as a first step in confronting it properly.

marginal phoneme vocal gesture nen

1. Marginal phonemes in Nen and their interactional setting

Nen is a Papuan language of the Yam family - see Evans (2014, 2015a,b) for basic grammatical information. Here we focus on its phonological system, for which more detailed information can be found in Evans & Miller (2016). In particular, I focus on the status of three marginal phonemes: the nasalised vowels /а/ and /є/, and the glottal fricative /h/.

The phoneme inventory for Nen is given in Figures 1 (consonants) and 2 (vowels). Most phonemes in this inventory are richly attested. However, each of the three phonemes at issue here are marginal, in terms both of the number of words they occur in and their contexts of occurrence, and so are placed in rounded brackets (as distinct from angle brackets, used for graphemes where these depart from the standard IPA values; this is the practical orthography to be used here).

Figure 1. Nen consonant phonemes

Figure 2. Nen vowel phonemes

Let us now exemplify these marginal phonemes one at a time. Since the number of words they occur in is small and finite - in contrast with all other phonemes of the language - we will give complete listings.

First, /є/. This is confined to two interactional words. The first of these is the word for `yes', e, as in (1).

Table 2

`Are you going on your own?' `Yes, I'm going on my own.' Schwas in Nen are almost entirely predictable epenthetically, with the exception of a couple of words where they occur word-initially. When predictable, they are simply not written, e.g. <k9mm> [knm] `come!' Word-initially they are written as <a>. /э/ and /і/ are both short and in their phonology are rather reminiscent of the jers in early Slavic.

If this were only our example, it would be easy to relegate it to the realm of once-off sounds comparable to what is represented orthographically in English as mhm. However, it also occurs in one of the demonstratives, gehё ~ gehe, roughly translatable as `that one there - you should be able to find it easily, following my point'. In this demonstrative the last vowel is always lel; nasality may or may not creep back to the preceding vowel.

2 Ba y-m gehe

3 ABS 3SG-be:nd DEM

`There he is; here, this one is him (with pointing accompaniment)'

3 Tande nne bermber gehe

1SG.POSS food(ABS) portion(ABS) DEM

`Here's my portion (accompanying presentation of something).'

Each of these two words - e `yes' and ehe `thislthat one herelthere' - are `interactional' in the sense that they only make sense in closely-coupled dialogic contexts, the first as a response by one party to a question by the other, and the second when one party guides the attention of the other through pointing or presentation.

Now consider the other nasal vowel, lal. This is a slightly different case to lei. One of the words it occurs in is clearly interactional, while the other is an onomatopoeic bird name (and recall that onomatopoeic words and ideophones were mentioned above as another place where marginal phonemes are found).

Giving the interactional example first, there is a word lahal or lahal, whose primary use is in handing something to another person - something like `here you are' in English, though there are other languages with special interjections to signal this, such as the word nja! In Bininj Gunwok l Mayali (Evans 1992). Examples are given in (4) and (5). There is also a secondary use, not exemplified here, with a meaning close to English `sprung!' (but also one sense of `aha! '), uttered when you have come across your interlocutor at the moment of doing something they shouldn't be doing.

Table 3

The other place this phoneme occurs (for some speakers only) is in the name of the `whistling kite', a type of bird. According to the speaker, this word is pronounced in one of four ways: sikaka ~ sikaka ~ siykayka ~ sinkanka. Each of these is phonologically anomalous in some respect. In the first two there are nasal vowels (in non-interactional words). In the third version we have the abnormal sequence ф (/gg/, with voiced /g/ preceded by Irjl, would be alright, since prenasalised voiced stops occur, but there is no other case of a voiceless stop preceded by a homorganic velar nasal). And in the fourth version we have a heterorganic nasal + stop sequence /VnkV/; this is permitted at the phonemic level in Nen but the sequence nk would normally be broken up by an epenthetic vowel (see footnote 3 above), to give *[sinokanaka], whereas the attested pronunciation among the speakers is [sinkanka].

In any case, what is important here is that for some speakers, at least, the name of the bird For another bird-related Papuan example with a nasal vowel absent from the general phonemic system, see Mian, though here it is a matter of bird calls rather than bird names: `Nasal vowels are not phonemic in Mian but the cry of a crow is consistently emulated as hee.' (Fedden 2011: 580). includes a nasal /а/ (with further optional backwards propagation of nasality, as we saw with aha ~ aha `here you are' and gehё ~ gehe `this/that one I'm indicating').

Let us now pass from the nasal vowels /а/ and /є/ to the other marginal phoneme in Nen: the glottal fricative /h/. This is an interesting case, because Nen speakers are impressively multilingual, due to rules of clan exogamy that typically constitute bilingual households in which husband and wife speak different languages (Evans 2012a) and on top of that there is substantial exposure to English as a modern lingua franca. As a result, Nen speakers also knowing the neighbouring and closely related language Nmbu are familiar with, and use when speaking Nmbu, the phoneme /h/, which is in fact the regular reflex of Nen /s/, as can be seen from cognate pairs like Nen /sakr/ Nmbo /hakr/ `brother, boy'; Nen /samba/ Nmbo /hamba/ `village'; Nen /suri/ Nmbo /huri/ `true'. See Evans et al. (2018) for some regular sound correspondences. However, for Nmbo speakers the status of /h/ is tenuous, since younger speakers tend to drop it word initially (Kashima 2020). However, I do not know of any loanword from Nmbo into Nen that preserves the /h/ phoneme from Nmbo. The situation with English loanwords is rather different: according to their degree of familiarity with English, Nen speakers retain or drop English /h/ from loanwords like headmaster (> Nen /hedmasta/ ~ /edmasta/) or horse (> Nen /hos/ ~ /os/). In these cases the /h/ is word-initial and not connected with any unusual behaviour in adjoining segments. What we see with English loans, then, is a highly variable treatment of initial /h/, reflecting the complexities of how much English the speakers have in their repertoire.

In contrast to all of this, the situation with /h/ in interactional words is quite stable. All Nen speakers, in all contexts, reliably pronounce the /h/ in the words we have already seen, namely the two words /aha/ and /gehe/. As far as I know (based on an initial collection of around 4,000 vocabulary items, given in Evans 2019) these are the only words with this phoneme. It is striking that in both cases the /h/ precedes a nasal phoneme (and of course that these are in turn restricted phonemes). This appears to be an instance of what Matisoff (1975) called rhinoglottophilia - the connection between laryngeal (glottal) and nasal articulations. He proposed that the effect was due to the acoustic similarity between glottal and nasal segments: both produce antiformants, due to their branched resonators, namely both nasal and oral cavities for nasal vowels, and both for glottals and laryngeals in the case of /h/, since the space below the glottis acts as a second resonator. For further examples of rhinoglottophilia see e.g. Krim, which lacks contrastive nasal vowels but in which are strongly nasalised after /h/, Piraha which exhibits similar nasalisation effects after /h/ and /?/, and Inor (Gurage, Ethiopia) which has developed nasal vowels where there were etymo-logical laryngeals/pharyngeal consonants. See Ahland (2006) and Boivin (1996).

What we have in the case of /h/, then, is a double distribution: a sociolinguistically-fluctuating distribution, word-initially, without other phonetic consequences, in the case of /h/ in loanwords, coupled with a sociolinguistically- fixed usage, by all speakers, in just a couple of interactional words, and in each case clearly associated with following nasal vowels.

More generally, to draw together our examination of marginal Nen phonemes in this section:

(a) The three relevant Nen phonemes - /а/, /є/ and /h/ - are all confined to interactional contexts, namely the interjections /aha/ `here you are', /є/ `yes' and /gehe/ `over here/there, look!'.

(b) Each of these marginal phonemes is invariant across the speaker population, in contrast to what appear phonetically to be comparable marginal phonemes either in onomatopoeic words (sikaka ~ sikaka `whistling kite') or loanwords (hedmasta ~ edmasta `headmaster')

(c) The nasal-vowel and glottal-fricative marginal phonemes are closely interlinked, exhibiting an interesting form of rhinoglottophilia: interactive /h/ only occurs in intervocalic position before a nasal vowel, and all interactive words of more than one syllable that contain a nasal vowel also contain an /h/.

Should these be included as regular phonemes or not? There is no straightforward answer to the question. /є/ forms a minimal pair with /e/ (`cry', a preverb [Evans 2019]), but for the others it is impossible to find an exact minimal pair because of the presence of two, mutually conditioned, restrictive phonemes (i.e. since both a nasalised vowel, and an /h/, are co-present, it is not possible to find a word differing on just one of these). In other words we can contrast eC<-nasal>e with ehe (as in gege `son' vs gёhё `over here/there, look!'), but we can't independently vary the vowel nasality and the glottal articulation to construct contrasts on just one of those.

If we appeal to number of words the case for including them is weak; on the other hand they exhibit regular phonotactics apart from the rhinoglottophilia effects just mentioned. The most convincing answer is probably to say that they are phonemes, but not regular ones: that the phonology is structured around a core of fully regular phonemes augmented by an outer layer of more restricted ones, to which /а/, /є/, and /h/ belong. And unlike all other phonemes, for which it is not possible to find a unifying semantic or pragmatic characteristic, these three restricted phonemes all have a strong `interactional' flavour - in each case they occur in contexts where the dialogic element of language is particularly salient: the interaction between speaker and hearer across question-and-answer (ё `yes'), request-and-fulfilment (aha `here you are') or training of mutual attention (gehe `here/there, look!').

2. An English puzzle: initial /6/ vs /6/

After our initial discussion of a little-known Papuan language, Nen, the reader may ask how relevant such obscure languages are to general questions of linguistics. It therefore behoves us to return to a well-studied language, English, to show that comparable effects are to be found there, in a different guise, namely the distribution between /9/ and /6/ in word-initial position.

As is well-known, English contrasts fricatives, by voicing, at several points of articulation, and in all major phonotactic positions - word-initial (feel vs veal), word-medial (elfish vs elvish) and final (life vs live⁸). Curiously, however, the contrast between /9/ and /6/ (unhelpfully represented by the same digraph <th>) is not found in all three positions. While occasional minimal pairs can be found word- finally, particularly in association with noun-verb heterosemy: wreath [9] (n.), wreath [6] (v.); teeth [9] (n.), teeth [6] (v.), mouth [9] (n.), mouth [6] (v.).

However, there are basically The deficiencies of English orthography make it necessary to specify that the pronunciation of live intended here is /laiv/, as in `live wire' or `live show'. Depending a bit on where we draw the boundaries. If we include the archaic thy, then thy vs thigh is a minimal pair. If we allow multi-word sequences, with this'll [disel] (< this will) contrasts minimally with thistle [9isal]. Both these pairs contrast a closed-class, interactional word with an open-class noun. NO minimal pairs word-initially: both phonemes are found in word-initial position, but they are assorted by lexeme, as in Table 4.

Table 4. English /6/ vs /6/ in word-initial position