Reconciling the debate about final obstruent voicing: The phonology of Lakota obstruent lenition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Word-final obstruent voicing has been claimed to be unavailable as a synchronicphonological process due to universal markedness constraints. However, Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2004) predicts the possibility of such a phonologicalrule, and purports to show it in various languages, touching off a debate withKiparsky (2006, 2008). Searching for a more robust example, Blevins et al. (2020)provide a phonetic study of voicing in Lakota. They show that Lakota has phoneticalternations between voiceless and voiced stops, with the voiced stops appearingin final position. They therefore claim the language has a synchronic phonologicalrule of final obstruent voicing. We call into question the assumed phonological status of final voicing in Lakota. Phonetically, Lakota does have only voiced stops infinal position, but at the same time final fricatives are neutralised to the voicelessseries. We show that, rather than neutralizing stops toward a marked or complexstructure, Lakota has only a process of phonological lenition in weak positions:sonorisation of stops and devoicing of fricatives. Under the assumption that manner of articulation is a structural property, a single lenition process can producefinal voiceless fricatives but final voiced stops.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".