ABSTRACT
Principles of Uniformity and Solidarity are proposed as underlying the structure of linguistic sound systems. Uniformity is the tendency for segment inventories to contain elements representing all likely combinations of a language’s place, manner and phonation types. “Solidarity” is Jakobson’s term for the fact that “unmarked” values are “simpler”, that the presence of a marked term implies the presence of the unmarked counterpart and that unmarked terms are more frequent within a given language (cf. Zipf’s “Equilibrium”). This further implies that within-language frequency should mirror cross-language occurrence. This chapter examines how far these expectations are borne out using both newly-conducted and previously published frequency counts of stops from a diverse language sample. Some well-known exceptions to Uniformity (such as the “missing /p/” and “missing /g/” patterns) are revisited, together with their analogs among glottalized and doubly-articulated stops. The distinction between dental and alveolar stops is also explored, both within and across languages.
