'Fortition is impossible. But does it occur?'Patrick Honeybone (University of Edinburgh)
Lenition (or 'weakening'), a common type of process in the phonology of the world's languages,
involves processes like spirantisation (in which, for example, b, d, ɡ come to be realised as β~v, ð, ɣ)and debuccalisation (in which, for example, fortis fricatives such as f, s or x come to be realised ash). Attempts to make sense of lenition as a phonological phenomenon have provided fertile groundfor representational phonological theories, such as element theory (e.g., Harris 1994, Backley 2011).
In approaches of this type, phonological processes are only possible if they are motivated by theenvironment in which they occur (the 'Non-Arbitrariness Principle' - see Balogné Bérces &Honeybone 2020). Thus, in the same way that assimilations are expected in phonology due to thespreading of subsegmental material from a local source, lenitions can be compellingly modelled insuch approaches as segmental decomposition/delicensing, which is expected in prosodically 'weak'positions.
It is sometimes argued that 'the opposite of lenition' also occurs in phonology - that is: fortition (or'strengthening'). For example, Blevins (2015) argues that “while regular sound changes involving
strengthening are, overall, less common than weakening ... they ... require a place in any soundchange typology”. Although this is phrased as a diachronic claim, 'sound change' is regularlyinterpreted as 'the addition of a phonological process to a language', so this could also be a claim
about synchronic grammars.
For phonological models of the representational type (as discussed above), fortition would need toinvolve the addition to a segment of subsegmental material with no local source, which would violate
the Non-Arbitrariness Principle. Fricatives would need to acquire occlusion from nowhere, forexample, or h would need to acquire arbitrary place features. Fortition is thus predicted in suchmodels to be impossible. In this talk, I tackle this issue head on. I consider several cases ofphonological phenomena which have been argued to be examples of fortition (such as h becoming
realised as ç in Tinrin, h becoming realised as s in Singhi, β becoming realised as b in Spanish, andβ, ð, ɣ becoming realised as b, d, g in Germanic) and show that they in fact have better explanations
as something else (that is: they only *look like* they are cases of fortition, but if we think about
them carefully, they do not fit the bill as authentic cases of 'the opposite of lenition'). I argue,
therefore, that Blevins' claim cannot be interpreted synchronically: fortition does not occur inphonology, just as element-theory-type representational phonology predicts.
REFERENCES
Backley, Phillip. 2011. An Introduction to Element Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Balogné Bérces, Katalin & Honeybone, Patrick 2020. Representation-based models in the current
landscape of phonological theory.' Acta Linguistica Academica 67.1, 3-27.
Blevins, Juliette. 2015. Evolutionary phonology: A holistic approach to sound change typology. InPatrick Honeybone & Joseph Salmons (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology, 485–500. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, John. 1994. English Sound Structure. Oxford: Blackwell.

High vowel devoicing revisited: preferentiality, universality and typology
Hyung-Soo Kim(Jeonju University)csjennykim@hanmail.net
Up to now, two approaches have dominated the study of language universals: the Chomskyan
generative approach whose aim is to find the innate Universal Grammar that can explain how a childacquires its native tongue with such ease (Chomsky 1965 et seq.); and the Greenbergian approach
whose typological analysis looks for implicational universals to explain the cross-linguistic diversity(Greenberg 1966 et seq.). Recently, these two approaches have been criticized by Evans and Levinson(2009 et seq.) for lack of absolute universals and coherent typology.
In this paper, I take a third approach, in which an absolute universal is sought by looking forpreferential conditions on universal processes, which in turn predict cross-linguistically what ruleconfigurations are possible and what are not, thus tightly constraining the variation in the typology.
Taking hints from what Greenberg (1969) calls dynamic comparison of languages and Foley’s (1977)
preferential linguistic change, I first analyze vowel devoicing in the nine languages Greenberg presents
for evidence of his implicational universal on high vowel devoicing (Table 1). His universal, whenrestated as a preferential principle, ‘the higher the vowel, it is more likely to devoice’, predicts that of
the eight logically rule configurations, only four (types 1, 2, 3 and 6) are linguistically possible (Table2). However, this prediction does not hold for some languages because many other factors besides
vowel height affect vowel devoicing, e. g. front- or back-ness of the vowel, length, stress and pitch,which raises the question of what really controls it.
A different picture emerges in recent phonetic studies of devoicing. In languages such asJapanese, Modern Greek, and French, the experimental results show that vowel devoicing is typicallyvariable and gradient, so that its preferentiality among vowels manifests as robustness of occurrence,with high vowels in general showing higher rate of devoicing than low vowels. But there are
discrepancies: in Tokyo Japanese, for example, /u/ seems to devoice more robustly than the front /i/,contrary to what happens in Korean, Turkish and French.
The overriding question is thus: what is the primitive that governs preferential devoicing?
Delving into this question from diverse angles leads to the conclusion that it is vowel sonority, or its
acoustic equivalent, resonance, that controls vowel devoicing in languages, even though we are far
from calculating it precisely. This is based on the premise that as a phonetic process, the event of vowel
devoicing occurs automatically, under the universal condition that the resonance value of the vowel besufficiently small: |VR|≤ δ. Since unlike consonants the articulatory gestures of vowels often varyfrom language to language, the VR value will vary accordingly, giving parochially defined resonancehierarchies. In Tokyo Japanese, /u/, as the shortest vowel, will be the lowest on such scale, thus themost likely to devoice, but in Korean, Turkish and French, the ranking will be reversed, with /i/ being
lower and more likely to devoice than /u/, ceteris paribus.
Select references

Chomsky N. 1957. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.
Evans, N. and S. C. Levinson. 2009. The myth of language universals: language diversity and its
importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 32. 429–492.
Foley, J. 1977. Foundations of Theoretical Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, J (ed). 1963. Universals of Language. London: MIT Press.
Greenberg, J. 1969. Some method of dynamic comparison in linguistics. In J. Puhvel (ed.)
Substance and Structure of Language. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. 147203.
Table 1 High vowels and voicelessness (cf. Greenberg 1969: 169)
Language

Voiceless andvoiced

Voiced only

Awadhi (Indo-Aryan)i, u, ea, oCampa (Arawakan)

io, e, aChatino (Otomanguean)i, uo, e, aDagur (Mongolic)i, u, e([ə])

o, aHuichol (Uto-Aztecan)i, ʌ([ɨ]), eu, aSerbo-Croatian (South Slavic)

i, uo, e, aTadjik (Indo-Iranian)i, u, ae(:), o(:), ú(:)

Tunica (Amerindian)ui, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, oUzbek (Turkic)

i, ue, ɔ, o, aTable 2: Rule configurations for vowel devoicing (Ο = devoicing, X = no devoicing)
Configuration
type

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8highΟΟO

X

X

X

OX

midX

Ο

OO

X

X

X

OlowX

X

OO

OX

OX

Vowel height