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Journal of Universal Language
Sejong University Language Research Institue

J. Univers. Lang. 2004; 5(1):85-117

pISSN: 1598-6381

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22425/jul.2004.5.1.85

Article

Universals, their Violation and the Notion of Phonologically Peculiar Languages

Vladimir Pericliev1
1Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Copyright ⓒ 2016, Sejong University Language Research Institue. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jan 01, 2017

Abstract

A language can be said to be “peculiar” if it violates a universal pattern that admits only very few exceptions. In the paper, we propose a typology of phonological peculiarities concerning the content of segment inventories, and deal in detail with one of these types. The type involves the illegitimate absence of a segment that an implicational universal predicts should actually be present in the segment inventory of a language. A computer program retrieved 33 phonological peculiarities of this type in the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID), comprising 451 languages. It turned out that 391 of these languages had no peculiarity of the type studied, 43 had one, and 17 more than one peculiarity. Some observations are made regarding the last category of 17 “strongly peculiar” languages. In particular, it is shown that despite their strong phonological idiosyncrasy, the peculiar languages have only a limited variability in that they cannot violate more than six universals or have more than three distinct segments lacking.

Keywords: phonological universals; types of phonological peculiarities; gaps in segment inventories

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