What are metaphonemes?
Metaphonemes are phoneme correspondences that exist across languages. If we know, for example, that words which are realised with an /{/ in English are usually realised with an /A/ in Dutch, and an /a/ in German (as in cat /k{t/ versus /kAt/ versus /kats@/), we might be able to generalise over these three language-specific phonemes and introduce a metaphoneme, e.g. |{Aa|, which captures this generalisation. |
Dutch: /kAt/
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Depending on the language, this metaphoneme will then be realised as an /{/ in English, an /A/ in Dutch, and an /a/ in German.
What can you do with metaphonemes?
Our aim is to incorporate these metaphonemes in a multilingual inheritance-based lexicon, which allows sharing of information across languages at all levels of linguistic description as described in PolyLex (Cahill and Gazdar 1999). The basic idea behind the PolyLex architecture is that abstraction across languages can be represented within a standard default inheritance hierarchy in virtually the same way as abstraction within a language. Thus, information which is common to several languages will be stated at higher points in the hierarchy than information which is language-specific. The PolyLex project defined a trilingual hierarchical lexicon for Dutch, English, and German sharing morphological, phonological and morphophonological similarities between these three languages. Here, we take the PolyLex framework as our basis. We focus on the phonological similarities between related languages and we extend the PolyLex approach by capturing cross-linguistic phoneme correspondences, such as the /{/ - /A/ - /a/ correspondence mentioned above. The assumption is that the introduction of metaphonemes increases the amount of phonological generalisations that can be captured between languages at the syllable level in a multilingual inheritance lexicon.How do you find metaphonemes?
The vowel phoneme inventories of the Germanic languages were taken as a testbed. We compiled a list of 800 (mono- and disyllabic) Germanic cognates (see "Resources" below), looked up their transcriptions, and then mapped words containing a particular vowel in one language onto its cognates in the other languages, to see how a particular vowel was realised in the other languages. This process was repeated for all vowels, for all languages of the test set. In a first pilot study, we defined vowel phoneme correspondences for three West Germanic languages - Dutch, English, and German. The phonemic transcriptions were taken from the CELEX database (Baayen et al. 1995). The resulting tables can be found hereIn a second pilot study, we extended our test set with a related but less-closely related language, i.e. Danish, a North Germanic language. The transcriptions for Danish were taken from (Hansen 1990). The resulting tables can be found here.
The next steps
We have had ESRC funding to complete this work, giving an account of the consonants in English, Dutch and German. This project (ESRC grant no:R000223681) employed Lynne Cahill for six months (August 2001 - February 2002) to undertake the further analyses.The correspondence tables for the consonants of English, Dutch and German can now be found here.
Resources
Papers
- Tiberius, C. & Cahill, L.J. (2000). Incorporating Metaphonemes in a Multilingual Lexicon. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2000), Saarbruecken, Germany, pp. 1126-1130. Available here (postscript).
- Tiberius, C. & Cahill, L.J. (2000). A MetaPhoneme Inventory. Proceedings of the 10th CLIN meeting, Utrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 193-200. Available here (gzipped postscript).
Datasets
- Cognate database: The current version of the database, including English, Dutch and German orthographic and phonological forms. Also included is Danish for as many as possible. A version with the Germanic roots will be available shortly.
- Multilingual lexicon with metaphonemes: The lexicon of nouns from PolyLex, in DATR, including English, German and Dutch noun morphology, phonology and morphophonology, adapted to include metaphoneme definitions where either a full metaphoneme definition or a partial metaphoneme definition applies. Here is a downloadable version (gzipped tar file).
The transcriptions used on this page are based on the SAMPA phonetic alphabet.
References
Baayen, H., R. Piepenbrock and H. van Rijn. 1995. The CELEX Lexical Database. Release 2 (CD-ROM), Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.Cahill, L. and G. Gazdar. 1999. "The POLYLEX architecture: multilingual lexicons for related languages". In Traitement Automatique des Langues 40:1, pp.7-25.
Hansen, P.M. 1990. Udtaleordbog. Gyldendal. Copenhagen.
This page was created by Carole Tiberius. It is
maintained by Lynne
Cahill and was last modified in September 2001
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