{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02593516209476309, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.556786703601108, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A theory of the theory of vowels

One line of research in theories of phonological primitives, such as features or elements, is to reduce the number of such primitives. Feature geometry theories can be seen as a way to do this: a segment is a tree that consists of a treelet (a subtree) of place features, a treelet of aperture features, etc. Especially within Element Theory, there has been a tendency to reduce the number of representational primitives also in other ways. A radical example of this is so-called Radical CV Phonology by Van der Hulst ( , , , ), which claims that there are only two such primitives, called C and V, which can be interpreted differently in different parts of the tree. Would it be possible to reduce the number of primitives even further? And what would the ultimate reduction be? Would there be a possibility of giving a representation for segments that would not include any elements? We know that graph theory, in particular the theory of trees, that already plays such an important role in grammatical theory, is a rather strong mathematical tool – could we not build a theory of vowels on it? This would imply that we have a theory in which the original elements |A, I, U| themselves have internal structure, and such structure would only be treelets. We think we can, and the following can be seen as a complete definition of vowel representations in natural language motivated by the desiderata above. It is the purpose of this paper to sketch what such a theory would look like. By doing so, we are basically building a metatheory of Element Theory. Our ‘data’ are most vocalic systems that can be successfully derived from the elements |A, U, I| and combinations thereof. We try to derive such systems making no use of elements. The resulting theory would therefore have the same consequences as ‘normal’ element theories, but it would give an answer to questions such as why there are three elements and why these elements each have their own special properties.