Deriving Natural Classes: The Phonology and Typology of Post-velar Consonants

Abstract

In this dissertation, I propose a new method of deriving natural classes that is motivated by the phonological patterning of post-velar consonants (uvulars, pharyngeals, epiglottals, and glot-tals). These data come from a survey of the phonemic inventories, phonological processes, and distributional constraints in 291 languages. The post-velar consonants have been claimed to constitute an innate natural class, the gutturals (McCarthy 1994). However, no single phonetic property has been shown to characterize every post-velar consonant. Using data from P-base (Mielke 2008), I show that the phonological pat-terning of the post-velar consonants is conditioned by the presence of a pharyngeal consonant, and argue more generally that natural classes can be derived from phonetic connections that link spe-cific subsets of phonemes. Phonological entailments (Burzio 2002a,b; Wayment 2009) are used to model these connections. Entailments are derived from the co-occurrence of features within a single phoneme, and state that if one element of representation (p) is present, then so is another (q). Entailments are central to deriving natural classes, and function as a source of explanation for why phonemes are able to pattern together. Because natural classes are proposed to be derived rather than representationally specified,