This paper provides a description
of Acehnese cluster phonotactics. We argue that, contrary to appearances,
Acehnese syllable structure is rule-governed. The examination of the role of
sonority in the construction of Acehnese complex onsets reveals that the
structure of onsets is controlled by universal principles, notably by the
Sonority Sequencing Principle, which holds that within an onset sonority must
rise towards the syllable nucleus. It is true that Acehnese has complex
clusters that do not conform to the Sonority Sequencing Principle but these
clusters are created by post-cyclic syllabification rules like Stray Segment
Adjunction which links stray liquids to syllable onset. We also argue that a
single sonority scale characterizes sonority in all languages and that this
scale subdivides the obstruents into stops vs. fricatives subclass, with
fricatives being more sonorous than stops. The Acehnese data provide the
strongest evidence for the well-formedness of Stop+Fricative clusters and for
the role of continuancy in determining sonority distinctions.
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Introduction
Sonority figures prominently in recent phonological
research. It is traditionally believed that the organization of segments within
the syllable and across syllables is guided by principles of sonority that rank
segments from least to most sonorous. Segment sequencing in onsets, for
example, is explained with reference to the Sonority Sequencing Principle,
which says that, within onset, sonority must rise towards the syllable peak.
The Syllable-Contact-Law (Murray and Vennemann 1983) holds that the
preferred contact between sequences of adjacent but heterosyllabic segments is
achieved when the coda of the first syllable is higher in sonority than that of
the segment that begins the second syllable.
Although
phonologists agree on the role sonority plays in the arrangement of segments
within the syllable (the most sonorous segment occupies the peak position,
while the less sonorous ones are relegated towards the syllable boundary),
there is a lack of agreement on its nature and a hot debate on whether sonority
scales are language-specific or there is a single scale common to all languages
and whether phonological principles governing syllable structure, such as the
Sonority Sequencing Principle, express absolute universals or tendencies. These
are some of the issues that will be the focus of our discussion when we present
data from Acehnese, a language with remarkable properties.
The
striking property of Acehnese is that its sonority violations are not
restricted to one end of the syllable domain. Study of many languages (such as
English, Russian …etc) with syllables that offend the Sonority Sequencing
Principle has led to the conclusion that a language that exhibits reversals
word-initially, for example, does not usually tolerate them word-medially. When
analyzing Acehnese data, it is obviously seen that complex clusters that do not
conform to the Sonority Sequencing Principle occur in word-initial position as
well as in word-internal position. Thus, Acehnese has a special rule allowing
the offending segments to be incorporated into the syllable onset
word-initially and word-internally.
It is
the purpose of this article to show that the anomalous onset clusters of
Acehnese are of particular interest, however, because they are not defined in
terms of position. That is, they are not restricted in their distribution to
the periphery of the syllabification domain, where they do not give rise to
problems of syllable division. This is what sets Acehnese apart from other
languages that exhibit sonority violations.
Another distinctive property of Acehnese is that it is
the only language on record whose phonotactics reveals a preference for
syllables that conform to the Sonority Sequencing Principle with respect to the
assumption that fricatives are more sonorous than stops. As a matter of fact,
the only obstruent clusters allowed in this language are stop plus fricative
sequences. This issue is important for syllable phonology because most theories
of the syllable and of sonority in particular do not recognize the need for
comparing these two classes of obstruents. Since the sonority scale is worked
out mainly on the basis of European languages, it is clear that these two
classes are basically never adjacent in any word, which makes it unnecessary to
compare directly their position on the sonority scale. Consequently, the
sonority scale does not include a subdivision of obstruents into stops and
fricatives. This is because the range of phenomena that involves sonority does
not appear to require any further subdivision of the sonority scale. Acehnese
syllable structure offers evidence that such a subdivision is clearly necessary
and that these clusters are well-formed with respect to the Sonority Sequencing
Principle.
The implication of this phenomenon for syllabic theory
is that onset clusters consisting of S+Stop are not regular onset clusters i.e.
they are marked. These onset clusters constitute a major outstanding problem in
current phonological theory. They violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle.
But despite this fact, these types of clusters are relatively common across a
significant number of languages that allow complex onsets. In this paper we
propose an extension of Clements’ (1990) Dispersion Principle, an evaluation
metric that determines the relative complexity of cluster types on the basis of
their degree of distance from the optimal syllable and conclude that the reason
why S+Stop onsets are relatively frequent across languages is because they are
the least marked within the class of sonority reversals.
The remainder
of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives pertinent background on
the basic facts of Acehnese syllable structure. Section 3 provides theoretical
background of sonority. In section 4 we discuss Acehnese onset clusters and
show how they bear on current issues in sonority theory. Section 5 summarizes
the most important conclusions.
Acehnese is an Austronesian language spoken by about
two and a half million people in the
The data
on Acehnese presented here come from the Pidie dialect and have been elicited
from four different informants; (i) Muhammad Yusran Hadi from Lemteh, Banda
Aceh. Currently College of Shari’a ‘Islamic Law’ at Islamic University in
Medina (his mother is Pidie and his father a Pase), (ii) Biktiyar a teacher of
social sciences in an Indonesian school in Jidda, (iii) Mashhuudi a student of
UKM in Malaysia, majoring in economics, and who visits Makkah to perform ‘Umrah
during Ramadhan, and (iv) Sulayman Ashi, currently an employee of Umm Al-Qura
University in Makkah (All other
informants are from Siglie, i.e. speak Pidie dialect).
The consonant and vowel
inventories of Acehnese are given in (1) and (2) respectively.
(1) Acehnese
consonant phonemes
bilabial
alveolar palatal velar
glottal
Stops p
t c k
?
b d Š g
Fricatives
s S h
Nasals
m n J N
Trill
r
Lateral l
Glides
w j
Notes: All transcriptions are given in IPA. /s/ is a special IPA symbol used here for a laminal
alveodental fricative.
(2) Acehnese vowel phonemes
Monophthongs
Oral
i 1 u
e @ o
E V O
a
Nasal
ĩ 1 u
E V O
a
Diphthongs
Oral
i@ 1@ u@
E@ O@
Nasal
ĩ @ 1@ u@
E@ O@
The maximum syllable in Acehnese is C(C)V(C). On the
surface, underived lexical items belong to the following syllable types:
(3) Monosyllables
a. CV bu ‘boiled
rice’
?i@ ‘water’
b. CVC goh ‘hump’
?u@t ‘to rub’
c. CCV cru ‘to start running’
glu@ ‘slippery’
d. CCVC grah ‘thirsty’
tri@N ‘bambo’
In addition
to the monosyllabic types in (3), the following polysyllables obtain:
(4) Disyllables (Note that here a period is used to indicate
syllable boundaries).
a. CV.CV ra.ga ‘basket’
ba.tE@ ‘stone’
b. CV.CVC la.wan ‘enemy’
na.l1@N ‘grass’
c. CV.CCV m1.rha ‘to dissolve’
su.kla ‘very black’
d. CV.CCVC si.krop ‘scoop’
e. CVC.CV lin.to ‘bridegroom’
ban.ci ‘hate’
f. CVC.CVC ?1N.kot ‘fish’
man.dum ‘all’
g. CVC.CCV ?1N.khuj ‘to beat’
sin.thu@ ‘slippery’
h. CVC.CCVC ?1n.tr1? ‘later’
man.drEt
‘type of drink made of ginger
or cardamom’
(5) Trisyllables
a. CV.CV.CV si.ku.la ‘school’
k1.bi.ri ‘sheep’
b. CV.CV.CVC mu.pa.kat ‘to confer’
k1.mu.Jan ‘incense’
c. CVC.CV.CV pan.cu.ri ‘thief’
Onset consonants in Acehnese are obligatory. All single consonants can
be syllable-initial. In addition, syllable onsets may consist of a cluster of
stop or liquid plus the glottal fricative h. Also permitted are clusters
of stop plus liquid.
(6) Onset clusters in Acehnese
a. stop+h
phon ‘first’
bhEp ‘pocket’
thon ‘year’
dhO@ ‘forehead’
khem ‘to
laugh’
gham ‘to beat’
chEn ‘to hop’
Šho ‘to push headlong’
b. liquid+h
lho? ‘deep’
rhah ‘to wash’
c. stop + liquid
praN ‘war’
ploh ‘ten’
bri ‘to give’
blO@ ‘to buy’
trOm ‘to kick’
drO@ ‘self, person’
croh ‘to fry’
Šru@? ‘to put in salty water for a day or two (of
fruits and eggs)’
kru@N ‘river’ kli? ‘to cry’
gra? ‘to
lift up’ glu@ ‘slippery’
Syllable-final consonant inventory is severely limited. The attested
coda consonants are depicted in (7a) and exemplified in (7b).
(7a) Acehnese syllable-final
consonants
Stops p
t ?
Fricatives h
Nasals
m n N
(7b) rap ‘near’
h1òt ‘desire’
ba? ‘tree’
peh ‘grind’
tEm ‘tin
can’
?on ‘leaf’
kVN ‘strong’
Let us close the discussion
of syllable codas with an important observation. Although the palatal glide /j/
can apparently close the syllable as in (8)
(8) rhej ‘a ruler’
buj ‘pig’
koj ‘relatives’
,it best be viewed as a diphthongal offglide rather
than a coda consonant. Diphthongs
abound in this language. Nothing in the
following discussion hinges on this point, however.
There has been little agreement on the question of what sonority is and
how it should be defined. Phoneticians have proposed different phonetic
parameters to characterize sonority. Based on acoustic intensity, Ladefoged
(1993) defines sonority as the perceptual saliency or loudness of a particular
sound. In Selkirk (1984), it is interpreted in terms of degree of opening;
vowels are the most open, i.e. sonorous, sounds followed in decreasing order by
liquids, nasals, fricatives, and stops. Multiple phonetic parameters have been
proposed as well; Butt (1992) presence or absence of voicing and frictional
noise; (Ohala and Kawasaki (1984) amplitude, periodicity, spectral structure,
and fundamental frequency.
Phonologists, on the other hand, disagree on whether the sonority of a
given segment is determined by a multi-valued feature that either makes major
class features seem superfluous or eliminates them entirely from the theory of
phonotactics, or whether it should be derived from major class features. While
Hankamer and Aissen (1974) assign the feature sonority a range of values from 1-9
with stops near 1 end of the scale and vowels at the high end of the continuum,
Selkirk (1984) assigns a sonority index to individual segments that reflects
position on the sonority hierarchy. In other words, there is a single n-ary
feature [sonority], which captures natural classes of segments. Kiparsky (1981)
arrives at a sonority scale which is defined with reference to the major manner
class features [syllabic], [consonantal], [sonorant], [nasal], and
[continuant]. Clements (1990) derives sonority from the number of plus
specifications for the features [syllabic], [vocoid], [approximant], and
[sonorant]. Some phonologists have suggested that the relative sonority of a
particular segment is formally represented in terms of geometric tree
structure. In Rice (1992) the more class nodes in the tree structure, the
greater the sonority of the segment in question. The liquids have two nodes in
addition to the Root node, nasals have one and stops have none. In Dogil (1992)
the more class nodes in the tree structure, the lesser the sonority. Thus, the
segments of lowest sonority are laryngeals that consist of a laryngeal gesture.
[For excellent review of phonological models of sonority, see Cser
(2000)].
There are a number of competing sonority scales in the literature that
rank segment types in order of their relative sonority. Views differ widely on
how the sounds of speech can be arranged along a scale of sonority. The main
question revolves on whether sonority ranking is language particular (9), or
whether there is a single universal sonority scale that governs phonotactic
patterning in all languages (10).
(9) Representative sample of
language-specific sonority scales (from least to most sonorous)
a. Steriade (1982) for non-syllabic segments
(i)
for
Classical Latin:
p,
b, k, g < t, d < f < s < m < n < l < r
(ii) for
Attic Greek:
p, t, k < b, d, g < s < z < n, m < l
< r
b. Hankamer and Aissen (1974) for Pali
stops <
s < nasals < l < v < y < r < vowels
c.
voiceless stops < voiced stops < noncoronal
fricatives < coronal fricatives < n < m < liquids < vowels