Inventories in Functional Phonology*

Functional Phonology, which makes a principled distinction between articulatory and perceptual representations, features, and constraints, can describe as well as explain the symmetries as well as the gaps in inventories of vowels and consonants. Symmetries are the language-specific results of general human limitations on the acquisition of perceptual categorization and motor skills. Gaps are the results of local hierarchies of articulatory effort, perceptual contrast, and perceptual confusion. There is no need to posit a dedicated inventory grammar: inventories are the automatic result of the constraints and their rankings in the production grammar. Consider the short-vowel system of Frisian: i y u e O o E ç a (1) Inventory (1) shows two common properties of inventories: (a) Symmetry. The eight non-low vowels occur in only three heights and three “places”; they are not scattered randomly throughout the space of possible vowels. In §1.1, I will show that this symmetry is real. ‘Phonetic’ approaches to sound systems like (1) have not taken into account the symmetrizing principles of perceptual categorization and motor learning, though these are general phenomena of human behaviour, not specific to phonology. (b) Gaps. The lower-mid-short-vowel system has a gap at /ø/. This must have something to do with the fact, stressed by the trapezoidal shape of (1), that the perceptual front-back contrast is smaller for lower vowels than for higher vowels. ‘Phonological’ approaches have ignored the explanatory power of the communicatively functional principles that segments will tend to be well contrasting and easy to articulate, although these principles can now easily be expressed as near-universal rankings in a constraint grammar In Functional Phonology (Boersma 1997a), the effects of perceptual categorization, motor learning, perceptual contrast, and articulatory effort are expressed directly in the grammar. In the current paper, I will show that this approach is capable of representing the symmetries as well as the gaps of segment inventories. * This paper also appeared as Rutgers Optimality Archive #232.