Deciding the status of controversial phonemes using frequency distributions; An application to semiconsonants in Spanish
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| Auteurs: | , , |
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| Format: | artículo original |
| Date de publication: | 2018 |
| Description: | Exploiting the fact that natural languages are complex systems, the present exploratory article proposes a direct method based on frequency distributions that may be useful when making a decision on the status of problematic phonemes, an open problem in linguistics. The main notion is that natural languages, which can be considered from a complex outlook as information processing machines, and which somehow manage to set appropriate levels of redundancy, already ‘‘made the choice’’ whether a linguistic unit is a phoneme or not, and this would be reflected in a greater smoothness in a frequency versus rank graph. For the particular case we chose to study, we conclude that it is reasonable to consider the Spanish semiconsonant /w/ as a separate phoneme from its vowel counterpart /u/, on the one hand, and possibly also the semiconsonant /j/ as a separate phoneme from its vowel counterpart /i/, on the other. As language has been so central a topic in the study of complexity, this discussion grants us, in addition, an opportunity to gain insight into emerging properties in the broader complex systems debate. |
| Pays: | Kérwá |
| Institution: | Universidad de Costa Rica |
| Repositorio: | Kérwá |
| Langue: | Inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:kerwa.ucr.ac.cr:10669/85280 |
| Accès en ligne: | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378437118309683?via%3Dihub#! https://hdl.handle.net/10669/85280 |
| Mots-clés: | Complex systems Natural languages Linguistics Phonology Redundancy Semiconsonants |