On the relationship between the numbers of vowels and consonants in phonological systems  

Oleh:

Stephens, Laurence D. ; Justeson, John S.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of The Language Sciences vol. 22 no. 4 (1984), page 531-545.

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/LING/22 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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Isi artikel

It is frequently supposed that there is a balance, or correlation, between the number of vowels and the number of consonants in the languages of the world. We test this hypothesized balance in a genetically stratified sample of languages and show that there is no evidence for it. In fact, the sizes of vowel and consonant inventories are statistically independent; the statistical observations previously offered as evidence for balance have no linguistic significance but are artefacts of the definitions of the variables chosen for measurement. We also show that the probability distribution that describes both vowel and consonant inventories is the log-normal and that the lognormal distribution receives straightforward linguistic interpretation in terms of distinctive features. We discuss a number of implications for the cross-linguistic exploitation of phonetic features as a determinant of the segment-level statistical distributions of vowels and consonants.

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