Deciding the status of controversial phonemes using frequency distributions; an application to semiconsonants in Spanish
This addresses an open problem in linguistics for researchers studying phoneme classification, but it is incremental as it applies an existing complex systems perspective to a specific case.
The authors tackled the problem of determining the status of controversial phonemes in linguistics by proposing a method based on frequency distributions, concluding that Spanish semiconsonants /w/ and /j/ should be considered separate phonemes from their vowel counterparts.
Exploiting the fact that natural languages are complex systems, the present exploratory article proposes a direct method based on frequency distributions that may be useful when making a decision on the status of problematic phonemes, an open problem in linguistics. The main notion is that natural languages, which can be considered from a complex outlook as information processing machines, and which somehow manage to set appropriate levels of redundancy, already "made the choice" whether a linguistic unit is a phoneme or not, and this would be reflected in a greater smoothness in a frequency versus rank graph. For the particular case we chose to study, we conclude that it is reasonable to consider the Spanish semiconsonant /w/ as a separate phoneme from its vowel counterpart /u/, on the one hand, and possibly also the semiconsonant /j/ as a separate phoneme from its vowel counterpart /i/, on the other. As language has been so central a topic in the study of complexity, this discussion grants us, in addition, an opportunity to gain insight into emerging properties in the broader complex systems debate.