2017 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 127-140
The C/D model (Fujimura 1992, 2007) is an explicit framework that calculates the continuous physical gestures and other quantitative phonetic information of speech sounds from inputs that solely consist of qualitative phonological information. Fujimura proposes that the inputs to the C/D model are syllables, themselves consisting of sets of unary and underspecified phonological features, instead of a set of binary features used in many standard phonological theories. This paper slightly revises this original formulation by Fujimura and instead proposes that syllables can be further defined in terms of “mora sets”, in addition to unary features that define the qualitative characteristics of the Impulse Response Functions (IRFs). The argument is developed based on discussion of vowel devoicing in Japanese.
