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Weak and Semiweak Phonological Positions in English

Paper · 2011 · Katalin Balogné Bérces

Summary

English phonology usually sorts positions into two kinds. Strong positions, which are foot-initial, resist weakening. Weak positions invite lenition and reduction. Balogné Bérces argues that this split is too coarse. Within an unstressed stretch after a stressed syllable, the first position weakens more readily than the second. She calls the first weak and the second semiweak, borrowing a distinction proposed earlier for Dutch.

The evidence comes from three areas:

  • the allophones of /t/: aspiration, tapping, glottalling and the Withgott-effect;
  • vowel reduction;
  • a new investigation of schwa syncope in British English.

The account is formalised in Strict CV (CVCV) phonology, using two lateral forces with opposite effects. Licensing supports a segment, and government spoils it. Different combinations of the two yield strong, weak and semiweak positions.

The author also critiques foot-adjunction analyses (Withgott, Jensen, Davis). These either predict the wrong amount of aspiration or permit reduced vowels where none occur. They also cannot treat final and non-final dactyls alike, although the data show the two behave the same way.

Key points

  • Three-way classification. Strong positions are licensed but not governed. Weak positions are governed but not licensed. Semiweak positions are both licensed and governed. A fourth type, neither licensed nor governed, is also weak but lenites differently, for example through glottalisation.
  • Weak vs. semiweak contrast. Aspiration is more acceptable in capácity and éditor than in átom or glítter. In compétitive, the second /t/ taps or glottalises less readily than the first.
  • No final/non-final asymmetry. Against Davis (2003), the same strong–weak–semiweak pattern appears in non-final dactyls (mìlitarístic, Nàvratilóva) and in final ones (vánity). In final semiweak slots, tapping is somewhat more frequent and aspiration VOT is shorter. Even so, outcomes there still vary with word frequency and speech style.
  • Vowels follow the same pattern. Foot-medial open syllables reduce more than foot-final ones, a point first noted by Burzio (1994). In British English schwa syncope, the first schwa of words like functionary drops more easily than the second.
  • Word-initial pretonic syllables are hybrids. In potato, the vowel is reduced but the /p/ stays strong. The model derives this because no stressed vowel to the left diverts the syllable's licensing. Its government, meanwhile, is spent silencing the word-boundary marker.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Two independent forces with opposite effects, crossed with each other, give a four-cell classification that a single strong/weak scale cannot express; the middle cell naturally predicts variable outcomes.
  • I2. Each vowel slot gets only one use of licensing and one of government, so a relation spent on one target is unavailable for another, which explains complementary distributions.
  • I3. The word's start is represented as an explicit empty unit (the boundary marker) that actively takes part in relations and explains edge effects.
  • I4. The author tests a claimed contextual asymmetry (final vs. non-final dactyls) against the data, finds no real difference, and drops the extra machinery in favour of one uniform account.
  • I5. For semiweak positions the model predicts variation among outcomes rather than one categorical output, leaving room for frequency and style effects.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Entity salience or state certainty could be scored on two separate axes, such as support and undermining, so that "both" becomes an explicit, explainable category rather than a muddy midpoint.
  • I2 (frames): Treat semantic-role assignment as a consumable budget per predicate slot, so a role taken by one argument blocks it for others and conflicts are traceable.
  • I3 (tokens): Morphology and tagging rules could reference an explicit boundary pseudo-token, so that edge-specific behaviour is captured by rule rather than special-cased code.
  • I4 (learn): Before adding a context-specific repair rule, check against a control set whether the split actually matters, and keep the simpler rule when it does not.
  • I5 (tree): Mark constructions known to vary across parsers as "expected-variable", so that witness disagreement there is not counted as an error.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Pázmány Péter Catholic University.

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Katalin Balogné Bérces. 2011. Weak and Semiweak Phonological Positions in English. Journal of English Studies 9.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18172/jes.160

@article{berces2011weak,
  title = {{Weak and Semiweak Phonological Positions in English}},
  author = {Katalin Balogné Bérces},
  journal = {Journal of English Studies 9},
  year = {2011},
  doi = {10.18172/jes.160},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.160}
}

References

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