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Different speakers, different grammars: Productivity and representation of Xhosa labial palatalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

William G. Bennett  and
Aaron Braver
William G. Bennett*
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Linguistics, Artillery Road, Rhodes University., Makhanda, 6140, South Africa
Aaron Braver*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Texas Tech University, P.O. Box 43091, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA
*
w.bennett@ru.ac.za
aaron.braver@ttu.edu
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Abstract

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While cross-linguistic studies suggest that palatalization is preferentially triggered by high and front vocoids, and that it targets coronals or dorsals, Xhosa has a process of palatalization that is triggered by [w], and that targets only bilabials. This paper presents a wug test experiment, showing that some Xhosa speakers do systematically generalize this phenomenon to nonce words. This suggests that for those speakers, labial palatalization is indeed learned as part of their phonological grammar. Additionally, our findings show that some other speakers systematically do not apply palatalization in nonce words, suggesting that they have learned it as a pattern in the lexicon, and not as part of phonology. Drawing on evidence from a separate wug test experiment, we show that the inter-speaker variation in our results cannot be explained away as a task effect. As such, our results show that different speakers can have fundamentally different grammatical representations of the same sound pattern. Though Xhosa's labial palatalization pattern is phonetically unnatural, that does not indicate that it is necessarily outside the domain of phonology proper.

Keywords

Xhosamorphophonologyexperimental phonologyvariationdissimilationpalatalizationproductivity

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonological Data and Analysis , Volume 2 , Issue 6 , 2020 , pp. 1 - 29
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the authors under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 William G. Bennett & Aaron Braver.

Footnotes

*

Acknowledgments are due to many people for suggestions, comments, and helpful discussion at various points in the genesis of this work. We thank Martin Krämer, Olga Urek, Seunghun Lee, Andrew Van der Spuy, Lionel Posthumus, Jochen Zeller, Andries Coetzee, John Ohala, Richard Bailey, Eva-Marie Bloom-Ström, Mark de Vos, and audiences in Tromsø, San Diego, and Potchefstroom. For help preparing stimuli and collecting data, we thank Msindisi Sam, Kelly Goldstuck, Danica Kreusch, Olona Tywabi. Supporting funding was received from the Rhodes University Research Committee, and the South African National Research Foundation. Authors’ names are in alphabetical order. An earlier working paper based on the same experiment data was published in Nordlyd in 2018.

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