Commentary: Culture mediates the effects of humidity on language

IF 2.1 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2016-01-01 DOI:10.1093/JOLE/LZV009
Mark Donohue
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引用次数: 9

Abstract

Does (the presence or complexity of) tone inversely correlate with dryness of climate? The authors (Everett et al.) suggest that the absence of ambient humidity in the air negatively correlates with the presence of (complex?) lexical tone, partly because of the effect that dry air has to increase the difficulty in achieving precise articulatory targets. There are two main problems with the argumentation used. 1. Conflating ‘tone’ with ‘pitch’ or ‘fundamental frequency’, and mistaking ‘complexity’ with a syllable domain for tone assignment; 2. conflating ‘dry climate’ with the absence of humidity. The authors are not guilty in an absolute sense of these problems, acknowledging that there are complications. Their reliance on pitch contrasts as a proxy for tonal category contrasts, and the use of air humidity rather than (easily available) climate information for the ranges of different languages means that the authors are dealing with ephemeral correlations between proxy features. In the next two sections, I will critique the use of tone primarily to refer to distinctions realised by pitch, and the use of humidity as a powerful explanatory for the existence of tone categories. The authors acknowledge that ‘many non-pitch phenomena are associated with the production of tone, including ancillary laryngealization and duration influences’, but go on to claim that ‘the heightened role of F0 (and therefore pitch) in languages with complex tone is evident in the fact that its fine-grained modulation is required on every or almost every syllable, in contrast to pitch accent languages’. First, this …
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评论:文化调节湿度对语言的影响
音调(的存在或复杂性)是否与气候的干燥成反比?作者(Everett et al.)认为,空气中缺乏环境湿度与(复杂?)词汇语调的存在呈负相关,部分原因是干燥的空气增加了实现精确发音目标的难度。使用的论证有两个主要问题。1. 1 .将“tone”与“pitch”或“basic frequency”混淆,并将“complexity”与音节域混淆为声调分配;将“干燥气候”与缺乏湿度混为一谈。从绝对意义上说,作者对这些问题并不感到内疚,他们承认存在一些复杂性。他们依赖音高对比作为音调类别对比的代表,并且使用空气湿度而不是(容易获得的)气候信息来代表不同语言的范围,这意味着作者正在处理代理特征之间的短暂相关性。在接下来的两节中,我将批评使用音调主要是指通过音高实现的区别,以及使用湿度作为音调类别存在的有力解释。作者承认“许多非音高现象与音调的产生有关,包括辅助性喉音和持续时间的影响”,但接着声称“在具有复杂音调的语言中,F0(因此音调)的作用增强,这一事实很明显,与音调重音语言相比,F0在每个或几乎每个音节上都需要精细的调制”。首先,这个……
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来源期刊
Journal of Language Evolution
Journal of Language Evolution Social Sciences-Linguistics and Language
CiteScore
4.50
自引率
7.70%
发文量
8
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