Effects of Vowel Context On Consonant Place Identification: Implications for a Theory of Phonologization

A perennial question in linguistics concerns the nature of the relationship between phonology and phonetics. On casual observation the synchronic evidence is conflicting: while phonetically “natural” phonological processes abound, e.g., the palatalization of coronals preceding palatal vocoids, there are also plenty of examples of phonological processes for which phonetic motivation is not readily apparent (Anderson 1981). The fact that phonetic conditioning factors are not always evident can be taken as support for the dual claims of phonological theory that phonological systems are defined at a level distinct from phonetics, and that phonological processes need not be held to a criterion of phonetic plausibility or naturalness. In principle, any pattern that can be defined over the units of phonological representation, in accordance with formal constraints that hold over those representations, can form the basis for a phonological rule or constraint.