caa a22 4500 378893726 CHVBK 20180305123501.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20041020xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/lity.2004.8.3.351 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/lity.2004.8.3.351 Kabak Bariş 1. Universität Konstanz. Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels [Elektronische Daten] [Bariş Kabak] Evaluating Trudgill's correlation of phoneme inventory size with social factors, this paper highlights the role of phonological structure in the acquisition of phonological contrast, with particular reference to Turkic and Korean vowel inventories. Factors such as social dominance, isolation, and community size are shown not to provide plausible explanations for the loss of primary long vowels in most Turkic languages and their preservation in a few others, nor for the neutralization which long and short vowels currently undergo in Korean. It is suggested that such changes in phoneme inventories can be better understood as a result of phonetic and phonological processes involving the contrastive features and phonological contexts that define the phonemes in question. Processes referring to vowel length in Turkic and Korean are argued to have obscured its contrastive status in the organization of phonological knowledge by the speakers of these languages. © Walter de Gruyter Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure nationallicence Phonetics, phonology, prosody nationallicence acquisition nationallicence areal linguistics nationallicence Korean nationallicence language contact nationallicence phoneme inventories nationallicence Turkic nationallicence vowel quantity nationallicence Linguistic Typology Walter de Gruyter 8/3(2004-10-20), 351-368 1430-0532 8:3<351 2004 8 lity https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.2004.8.3.351 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.2004.8.3.351 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Kabak Bariş 1. Universität Konstanz NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Linguistic Typology Walter de Gruyter 8/3(2004-10-20), 351-368 1430-0532 8:3<351 2004 8 lity CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter