Phonotactic constraints in cognitive phonology
Phonotactics is a central concern in phonology. However, the status of these constraints in cognitive linguistics is different from that in the traditional generative approaches. In cognitive linguistics, meaningfulness is the essential characteristic of language and it may be that speakers do not e...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Cercle linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest - CerLICO
2009-06-01
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| Series: | Corela |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/corela/137 |
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| Summary: | Phonotactics is a central concern in phonology. However, the status of these constraints in cognitive linguistics is different from that in the traditional generative approaches. In cognitive linguistics, meaningfulness is the essential characteristic of language and it may be that speakers do not even spontaneously form autonomous memory structures of meaningless units like the speech sounds, but only of the symbolic ones (Liberman et al. 1980; Read et al. 1986; Lotto and Holt, 2000; Port and Leary 2005; Välimaa-Blum 2005, 2009, in press). Consequently, phonotactic constraints, which pertain to meaningless units, would constitute no independent knowledge base either. Also, languages are learned in function of their actual use, and negative phonotactic constraints, characterizing something that cannot be said, must be excluded on these grounds as well from a speaker’s grammar since it would be difficult to learn them in the absence of positive data (Taylor 2002). However, it has been shown that listeners are able to distinguish phonotactically well-formed nonce words from those that are ill formed (Schatzman and Kager 2007). I will now argue that this does not yet mean that speakers must have independent knowledge of the phonemes or phonotactic principles. The ability to separate what is phonotactically well formed from the ill formed is the result of the interplay of (i) two kinds of knowledge of the positive constraints, i.e., procedural and schematic, and (ii) an auditorily represented mental lexicon (Coleman 1998). Knowing the positive constraints entails knowing the negative ones as well, but without any pure abstract phonotactic constraints. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-573X |