Deciding the status of controversial phonemes using frequency distributions; An application to semiconsonants in Spanish

Manuel Ortega-Rodríguez, Hugo Solís-Sánchez and Ricardo Gamboa-Alfaro

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2018, vol. 503, issue C, 1020-1029

Abstract: Exploiting the fact that natural languages are complex systems, the present exploratory article proposes a direct method based on frequency distributions that may be useful when making a decision on the status of problematic phonemes, an open problem in linguistics. The main notion is that natural languages, which can be considered from a complex outlook as information processing machines, and which somehow manage to set appropriate levels of redundancy, already “made the choice” whether a linguistic unit is a phoneme or not, and this would be reflected in a greater smoothness in a frequency versus rank graph. For the particular case we chose to study, we conclude that it is reasonable to consider the Spanish semiconsonant /w/ as a separate phoneme from its vowel counterpart /u/, on the one hand, and possibly also the semiconsonant /j/ as a separate phoneme from its vowel counterpart /i/, on the other. As language has been so central a topic in the study of complexity, this discussion grants us, in addition, an opportunity to gain insight into emerging properties in the broader complex systems debate.

Keywords: Complex systems; Natural languages; Linguistics; Phonology; Redundancy; Semiconsonants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:503:y:2018:i:c:p:1020-1029

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2018.08.031

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