What and where 论文

摘要

The chapter attempts at a pretheoretical definition of lenition. After a brief introduction to the taxonomic and theoretical interpretation of theoretical terms (§1), the role of sonority hierarchies in lenition is discussed in §2, with the conclusion that the traditional one-dimensional hierarchies are not fit for defining lenition trajectories. In fact, problems occur even in what is supposed to be the prime motivation for such scales, namely, sonority sequencing within the syllable. The next section (§3) discusses some lenition networks, which supersede sonority scales in being multi-dimensional, thus allowing for more than one direction for lenition to proceed. However, such trajectories do no more than encode a corpus of observations, therefore they do not carry too much explanatory force, unless they can be shown to be usable in other domains of phonology. Lenition and assimilation are delineated in §4, giving a formal definition for both, and discussing the status of these processes in an autosegmental framework working with privative phonological primes. With the help of this definition, lenition types are categorized in §4.3, the environments where lenition is expected and where it is not expected are collected in §5. The relationship of lenition and neutralization is discussed in §6, showing that the two terms are not synonymous, and neither contains the other. Two types of change, affrication and aspiration, are the topic of §7, since both are treated as lenition by some, fortition by others. The next section (§8) contemplates the status of (de)gemination with respect to lenition, followed by the conclusions in §9.