A Phonetically-Based Optimality Theoretic Account of Consonant ...

1. Introduction
It has often been suggested (Martinet 1952, Lindblom 1990, among others) that
speech represents a compromise between two opposing goals: ease of articulation, which
requires the minimization of effort during speech production, and ease of perception, which
demands maximization and preservation of contrasts. In their discussion of phonetic
universals in the structure of consonant systems, Lindblom and Maddieson (1988) arrive at
the generalization in (1) after surveying phoneme inventories of the 317 languages in
UPSIDl:
1. "Consonant inventories tend to evolve so as to achieve maximal
perceptual distinctiveness at minimum articulatory cost"
(p. 72, their (6)).
In other words, small inventories will consist only of "phonetically natural" articulations.
As the inventory size increases (i.e., more contrasts are implemented), the more difficult
articulations will be recruited to ensure sufficient perceptual distinctiveness of the
segments, but only after the phonetically natural articulations have been saturated.
Similar strategies as stated in (l)--maximizing perceptual distinctiveness at
minimum articulatory cost--can be observed between subsets of a language's consonant
inventories. For example, Taiwanese has the word-initial consonants in (2a) and the non-
word-initial consonants in (2b) (adapted from Lin 1989: 248-249 and Zhang 1983: 7):
1 UPSID stands for "UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database. " The languages in UPSID are
selected "so as to approximate 'a properly constructed quota sample on a genetic basis of the world's extant
languages' (Maddieson 1984: 5)" (Lindblom and Maddieson 1988: 63).
1