The Role of Phonetic Knowledge in Phonological Patterning: Corpus and Survey Evidence from Tagalog Infixation

The task of linguistics could be viewed as discovering and explaining cross-linguistic regularities. In the realm of phonology, at least, it has become clear that this task is not as straightforward as it might seem. To take a simple example, it has observed that many languages assimilate a nasal consonant in place to a following obstruent (/an+pa/ [ampa]), while assimilation to a preceding obstruent (/ap+na/ [apma]) is less common. (See Steriade 2000, Hura et al. 1992 for discussion. ) This typological observation is accompanied by a functional observation, in this case a phonetic one: a nasal's place of articulation is more difficult to perceive in the environment vowel __ obstruent than in the environment obstruent __ vowel (for most places of articulation). The problem lies is translating the phonetic observation into an explanation for the typological observation.