On the Boundaries of Phonology and Phonetics

2.2.The spirantization – hardening asymmetry

a. tulv vo *tulv [b]o ‘winter village’

winter village

2. 
   cr vox *cr [b]ox 'a hill covered with grass'
   

c. tf r *tf [t] ‘entrance door’

house door

d. te vaqi *te [b]aqi ‘coal box’

coal box
Previous works have either described this context as an exception to CA, or did not discuss it. In most cases, these works simply stipulated that a) nouns do not undergo hardening, or alternatively b) only transitive verbs undergo hardening. Once stated as a condition this way, the application of hardening to nouns can indeed be avoided. However, adding such a condition (in either form) to a phonological rule pairs prosodic phonology with specific category labels (transitive verb, noun), which is unlikely to occur in natural languages (Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1986 etc.)._³⁸ But most critically, it is explanatorily unsatisfying; why should hardening be restricted to transitive verbs (or alternatively, why should nouns be an exception to hardening)? No literature provides a satisfactory answer to this question.

The tacit assumption prevailing in the previous works is that the input to CA is the citation form, i.e. the form that appears in isolation. Following this assumption, the transitive verbs ought to undergo hardening since they initiate with a fricative in the citation form. However, there is no a priori reason that the citation form should be the underlying form. In Shiraishi (2000), I defended the position that the citation form of these transitive verbs cannot be the underlying form, if we want to advocate a phonologically plausible analysis for the observed spirantization-hardening asymmetry. The lack of hardening in nouns could be interpreted as evidence that CA consists solely of spirantization, without hardening. I argued that transitive verbs of Nivkh initiate with a plosive at the underlying level, instead of a fricative that appears in the citation form. Initiating with a plosive, transitive verbs now undergo spirantization in the same way as nouns do.^{₃₉, ₄₀}

The analysis in Shiraishi (2000) leaves hardening out of the list of phonological processes; nouns do not undergo hardening since there is no hardening in the phonology of the language.

This analysis is free from category-specific specification in the structural description of the rule, which was inevitable in the previous analyses.

Although this analysis explains nicely why fricative-initial nouns never undergo hardening in Nivkh, it is not without problems. First, it manipulates the underlying form of a specific lexical category (transitive verb) in order to explain phonologically exceptional behavior. Although such a 'prespecification' at the underlying level is not an uncommon way to approach phonological exceptions (cf. Inkelas, Orgun and Zoll, 1997 amongst others), such an approach does not explain why only this particular class of words needs to undergo such manipulation. Since prespecification puts unpredictable information into the lexicon, it is a strong descriptive device which leaves little space for phonological generalizations. Contrary to what seems to be the case at first glance, the analytical gain of Shiraishi (2000) from previous analyses is not so obvious. One may ask correctly what the difference between the two analyses is, which claim that a) nouns are exceptions to hardening (previous analyses) or b) transitive verbs undergo spirantization because they initiate with plosives underlyingly (Shiraishi 2000). In other words, it remains an arbitrary choice that only transitive verbs, and not other categories, undergo prespecification.

Secondly, the relationship between the underlying form and the citation form is obscured in transitive verbs. By positing a form other than the citation form as the underlying form, the citation form would always be derived from the underlying form by some morphological operation. That is, Shiraishi (2000) created asymmetry between the morpholexical make-up between nominal and verbal stems.

In fact, this asymmetry describes the historical path of derivation of transitive verbs (Jakobson, 1957; Austerlitz, 1977). On synchronic grounds, however, it is highly doubtful whether such a morphological operation can be justified.

In the next section I propose an alternative approach to the spirantization-hardening (or noun-transitive verb) asymmetry, which makes use neither of prespecification nor of information about category labels. Instead, I will argue that correspondence relation between output forms plays a decisive role in distinguishing the phonological behavior of the two groups. Once stated this way, nothing ought to be stipulated in order to derive the surface form; this follows naturally from the phonological principles of the language.