Please take a look at the Dinafon blog. I have posted my LabPhon abstract there. It deals with a constriction location bias between C and V, which I have found in the Brazilian Portuguese lexicon (oral and written), and brought out through careful statistical analysis of the co-occurrence frequencies.
Lo and behold, the lips, the tongue blade/tip and the tongue dorsum come out as the winners. These articulators take advantage of the fact that they are used in different ways to produce C's and V's, and tend to stay where they are. In other words, C and V tend to agree in constriction location well above chance level (effect size OK). The bias is of moderate strength, and, thus, leaves room for contradictory trends to effect more distinctiveness where necessary.
There is a long way to go to demonstrate that the trend is universal, but I guess this is feasible. If it comes out as a true probabilistic universal, here is one more reason to use simple gestures with the most popular articulators to simulate the language games of our ancestors.
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2 comments:
Goldstein 2003 (ICPhS) also argues for the primacy of between-organ contrast. The evidence comes both from typology and the development of these contrasts in infants (not on the quote).
"[..] there is
some evidence that between-organ contrasts are primary within the phonologies of languages. Between-organ consonant contrasts employing lips, tongue tip, tongue
body, and velum organs are close to universal [12], while several within-organ contrasts (e.g., /t/-/T/) are quite rare."
We certainly should use the between organ contrasts first, probably with a CV pattern. My first idea is to give a slight bias to gestures which are more visible to the listener.
I will check Maddieson's work and UPSID to see up to what point the claim holds true.
That's quite right. I was there at the presentation and read the paper.
This paper was one of my motivations to temporarily give a more universalistic turn to my research on BP phonotactics.
I reasoned that phonotactic language signatures (the thing that I was after while I looked at V_V only) might become more visible if universal factors had been factored out. Little by little, I'm getting there.
Coming back to your primal gestures, there is yet another reason for me to agree with your suggestion of a high visibility constraint: "guttural" sounds are rated as harsh by many cultures because of their high occurrence in emotional vocalizations. Extensive use of such sounds to signal attitude might still be true of our primate cousins. It is, in a way, true of human children.
It is noteworthy that small children can sometimes produce a lot of such sounds in true or faked emotion, as well as in "sound tracks" for play (thunder, motor sounds, etc.) while they have not yet picked up quite similar rhotics in their languages.
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