{"id":2530,"date":"2013-06-19T20:34:30","date_gmt":"2013-06-19T18:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=2530"},"modified":"2013-06-19T20:35:38","modified_gmt":"2013-06-19T18:35:38","slug":"gitksan-phonotactics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=2530","title":{"rendered":"Gitksan phonotactics"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Gitksan phonotactics<\/strong>. By Jason Brown<\/strong>. (LINCOM studies in Native American linguistics 63.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2010. Pp. 125. ISBN 9783895865893<\/a>. $82.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Kyle Gorman<\/a>, Oregon Health & Science University<\/span><\/p>\n

This monograph, a revision of the Jason Brown\u2019s 2009 University of British Columbia dissertation, examines gradient consonant cooccurrence restrictions found in the lexicon of Gitksan, an endangered Interior Tsimshianic language spoken in British Columbia. This analysis is couched in harmonic grammar, in which input-output mappings are selected by numerically weighted constraints. The analysis is up-to-date and carefully argued.<\/span><\/p>\n

B asserts that all statistically significant restrictions in the lexicon should be incorporated into the synchronic grammar, an assumption shared in much of the previous research on phonotactics: \u2018…the patterns outlined above are statistically significant. Given this, it stands that these sound patterns should be explained by some linguistic mechanism\u2019 (48). While it would be a result of great interest were it to be shown that statistical criteria are both necessary and sufficient to identify phonotactic generalizations that are linguistically significant<\/span> (i.e. internalized by speakers), there is no reason to grant this assumption; a plausible alternative is that lexical tendencies are the result of a long complete diachronic change, but synchronically inert. Indeed, B himself suggests that the high frequency of roots containing multiple uvular consonants is the result of a diachronic process of long-distance assimilation. No attempt is made to show that the documented tendencies are reflected in word-likeness judgments or other psycholinguistic tasks.<\/span><\/p>\n

B identifies lexical tendencies by comparing the observed cooccurrence statistics to those that would arise by free combination, estimated with a Monte Carlo technique (Brett Kessler, The significance of word lists<\/em>, 2001). This requires a random shuffling procedure which is unbiased, one for which all n<\/em>! possible permutations of the list are equally likely to be generated, which further demands a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) with a period of at least (n \u2013 <\/em>1)!. Even for the relatively short root list used in this study (n = <\/em>645), the minimum period required is approximately 25080\u00a0 <\/span><\/sup>(\u2248 644!), far exceeding the abilities of all but the most sophisticated PRNGs. In such a situation, all but a tiny fraction of the possible permutations of this wordlist can never be generated by shuffling, and the Monte Carlo procedure is biased.<\/span><\/p>\n

B argues that gradient phonotactics should be considered in future efforts to document endangered languages. Ignoring questions about the synchronic status of the generalizations in question and the statistical procedure used to identify them, a catalog of gradient lexical tendencies is surely of far less documentary value than an enumeration of roots, since the former can be extracted from the latter. Unfortunately, B does not provide a root list and describes few substantive details of the phonological analysis used to phonemicize these roots.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The book itself suffers from an unusually small typeface, poorly rendered figures, and many stylistic and typographical errors, although I found none of consequence.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gitksan phonotactics. By Jason Brown. (LINCOM studies in Native American linguistics 63.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2010. Pp. 125. ISBN 9783895865893. $82. Reviewed by Kyle Gorman, Oregon Health & Science University This monograph, a revision of the Jason Brown\u2019s 2009 University of British Columbia dissertation, examines gradient consonant cooccurrence restrictions found in the lexicon of Gitksan, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2530"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2532,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530\/revisions\/2532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}