A grammar of spoken Chinese = 中國話的文法

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

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The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

Ethnologue: Languages of the World

Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet

Variation and universals in VOT: evidence from 18 languages

Phonation types : a cross-linguistic overview

Results of an acoustic study of voiceless fricatives in seven languages are presented. Three measurements were taken: duration, center of gravity, and overall spectral shape. In addition, formant transitions from adjacent vowels were measured for a subset of the fricatives in certain languages. Fricatives were well differentiated in terms of overall spectral shape and their co-articulation effects on formant transitions for adjacent vowels. The center of gravity measurement also proved useful in differentiating certain fricatives. Duration generally was less useful in differentiating the fricatives. In general, results were consistent across speakers and languages, with lateral fricatives displaying the greatest interlanguage variation in their acoustic properties and /s/ providing the greatest source of interspeaker variation.

/pdf/a-cross-linguistic-acoustic-study-of-voiceless-fricatives-3uzdj4w2mq.pdf

A cross-linguistic acoustic study of voiceless fricatives

This paper presents an Optimality-theoretic (Prince and Smolensky 1993) analysis of quantity-insensitive stress. A set of grid-based constraints is shown by means of a computer-generated factorial typology to provide a relatively tight fit to the full range of stress systems attested in an extensive survey of quantity-insensitive stress patterns, many of which have not been previously discussed in the theoretical literature.

A factorial typology of quantity-insensitive stress

The book is the first systematic exploration of a series of phonological phenomena previously thought to be unified under the rubric of syllable weight Drawing on a typological survey of 400 languages, it is shown that the traditional conception that languages are internally consistent in their weight criteria across weight-based processes is not corroborated by the cross-linguistic survey Rather than being consistent across phenomena within individual languages, weight turns out to be sensitive to the particular processes involved such that different phenomena display different distributions in weight criteria The book goes on to explore the motivations behind the process-specific nature of weight, showing that phonetic factors explain much of the variation in weight criteria between phenomena and also the variation in criteria between languages for a single process The book is unlike other studies in combining an extensive typological survey with detailed phonetic analysis of many languages The finding that the widely studied phenomenon of syllable weight is not a unified phenomenon, contrary to the established view, is a significant result for the field of theoretical phonology The book is also an important contribution to the field of phonetically-driven phonology, since it establishes a close link between the phonology of weight and various quantitative phonetic parameters

Syllable Weight: Phonetics, Phonology, Typology

This paper presents results of a survey of contour tones in 105 languages with lexical tone. Results indicate an implicational hierarchy of tone bearing ability, whereby long vowels are most likely to carry contour tones, followed by syllables containing a short vowel plus a sonorant coda, followed by syllables containing a short vowel plus an obstruent coda, followed by open syllables containing a short vowel. It is claimed that this tonal hierarchy is phonetically motivated: syllable types which are phonetically better suited to carrying tonal information are more likely to support contour tones. Languages whose tone distributions superficially appear to fall outside the range of variation predicted on phonetic grounds are demonstrated, upon closer examination, to be unexceptional in their behavior.

Matthew Gordon

Papers

Phonation types : a cross-linguistic overview

A cross-linguistic acoustic study of voiceless fricatives

A factorial typology of quantity-insensitive stress

Syllable Weight: Phonetics, Phonology, Typology

A typology of contour tone restrictions