Phonology

Overview of Phonology

• Distribution of phones, phonemes and allophones
• Phonological rules
• Phonotactics
• Sound substitution
• Implicational laws
• Non-linear (auto-segmental) phonology
• Acquisition of phonology
• Phonological change and variation
• Why phonology?

Phone distribution, phonemes, allophones

• Categories and contrast
• How many different sounds does a language "use"?
  Are two different phones the "same" within a given language?
• Environment of a phone
• Overlapping distribution
  • Free variation
  • Contrastive distribution
• Complementary distribution, predictability, conditioned variation
• Phonemes
• Allophones
• Distinctive features
• Differences across languages in the use of features
• Tonemes
• What is an efficient way for a speaker/hearer to store the form of a word in the mental lexicon?
• Underlying (lexical) and surface representation
• Given several allophones, how is the phoneme represented?
• Two phones in complementary distribution: two phonemes or one?
• Phonemes and graphemes: tendency for alphabetic systems to assign one grapheme to each phoneme, but many exceptions
• Problems with insufficient data
• How many allophones?
• What good are phonemes?
• Are phonemes psychologically real?

Phonological rules

• Phonemic form (underlying representation) phonetic form
• Rule notation
• What rules are for
• Kinds of rules
  • Assimilation, dissimilation, neutralization
  • Insertion, deletion
• Optional (vs. obligatory) rules
• Rule ordering
• Why rules?
• Using rules for perception (word recognition) as well as production

Phonotactics

• Syllables and syllable structure
• Morpheme structure

Borrowing and foreign accent

• Sound substitution
• Phonotactics and simplification of syllable structure

Universal tendencies

• Phoneme inventories
• Which phones are languages likely to use more than others?
• Implicational laws
• Ease of production of different phones
• Ease of perception of different phones: maximally distinct vowels, consonants vs. vowels
• Ease of acquisition of phones
• Relative frequency of phones
• Sound stability and sound change in the history of a language

Autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith, etc.)

• Old view: UR a single linear sequence of segments (phonemes)
• Autosegmental view: UR is multi-dimensional

Phonological change

• Phonetic and phonemic change
• Preservation of phonemic distinctions: change in one phoneme results in change in another
• Loss of phonemes
• Compensation for losses of distinctions
• Emergence of new phonemes
• Unconditioned and conditioned sound changes
• Characteristic sound changes

Phonological acquisition

• "Pre-language": cooing, etc.
• Early discrimination of sounds
• Babbling and the "loss" of contrasts
• Early phones
• Early syllables
• Words with and without phonemes
• The child language as a system in its own right
• Perception and production: the "fiss" phenomenon