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: distinct phonological categories in a given language (dialect); used to distinguish different words from one another
• Allophones: variants of phonemes, their differences predictable from their environment
• Does changing the value of a single phonetic feature for a phone produce a "different" phone?
  Is the feature a distinctive feature in the language?
  Does changing the feature in other phones produce a comparable change?
• Differences across languages in the use of features:
  
• Tonemes: contrastive tones
• 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?
  • Use the least restricted allophone.
  • Use a representation which all allophones share.
• Two phones in complementary distribution: two phonemes or one? Is there other evidence that can help?
  
• Phonemes and graphemes: tendency for alphabetic systems to assign one grapheme to each phoneme, but many exceptions
  • One phoneme, multiple graphemes
  • Separate graphemes for allophones
  • One grapheme, multiple phonemes
  • Phonemes with no graphemes
• Problems with insufficient data
  • Homonyms: do you hear differences which are not significant and treat them as significant?
  • How can you know that a phone does not occur in a particular environment?
• How many allophones?
  Southern American English lax vowels: picking, picker, herring, heron; parry, parrot; hopping, hopper; putty, putter; pushy, pusher; dinner, thinner; ticking, tipping; ticker, tipper; bicker, bilker
• What good are phonemes?
• Are phonemes psychologically real?
  • Do listeners segment an utterance in phonemes, or do they use larger units?
  • Are the basic gestures of articulation best described in terms of phonemes or larger units?
  • Are words stored in the mental lexicon in terms of phonemes or larger units?

Phonological rules

• Phonemic form (underlying representation) phonetic form
• Rule notation
• What rules are for
  • Specifying detailed realization of phonemes as allophones
  • Making modifications where morphemes come together
  • Making modifications accompanying informal or rapid speech
  • Specifying historical changes
• Kinds of rules
  • Assimilation, dissimilation, neutralization
    
  • Insertion, deletion
    
• Optional (vs. obligatory) rules
  
• Rule ordering
  
• Why rules?
  • Simplifying articulation: assimilation, insertion, deletion
  • Simplifying perception: dissimilation, insertion, (deletion)
• Using rules for perception (word recognition) as well as production: this is not straightforward at all

Phonotactics

• Syllables and syllable structure
  Two extremes:
  • iai uou aia uee ao aua aia ie
    `They had two flowers and four sails.' (Kiribatese)
  • 
    `then he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant' (Bella Coola)
• Morpheme structure: there may be constraints on what the phonological shape of morphemes can be, for example, 2 or more syllables may be necessary

Borrowing and foreign accent

• Sound substitution
  • Replacing a phone with one nearby
  • Failing to distinguish two phonemes
• Phonotactics and simplification of syllable structure

Universal tendencies

• Phoneme inventories
  • Sizes of phoneme inventories
  • Symmetry in phoneme inventories
• Which phones are languages likely to use more than others? Implicational laws: given a less common phoneme, a language should also have a related more common phoneme.
• 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
  • Across languages
  • Within languages, functional load of phonemes and other contrastive features
• Sound stability and sound change in the history of a language

Phonological change

• Phonetic and phonemic change
• Preservation of phonemic distinctions: change in one phoneme results in change in another (example: NZ English lax vowels)
• Loss of phonemes
• Compensation for losses of distinctions (example: Mandarin Chinese)
• Emergence of new phonemes
  Example (English)
  • Early Old English 1: *kunni 'kin', *kinn- 'chin'
  • Early Old English 2: *kunni, *cinn- (palatalization)
  • Early Old English 3: kynni 'kin' (vowel fronting)
  • Old English: kynn, cinn (final vowel deletion)
  • Late Old English: kinn, cinn (derounding)
• Unconditioned and conditioned sound changes
• Characteristic sound changes
  • Assimilation
  • Deletion and insertion
  • Monophthongization and diphthongization
  • Metathesis
  • Raising, lowering, backing, fronting
  • Weakening of final segments
  • Vowel nasalization
  • Tones and the loss of initial voicing contrasts

Phonological acquisition

• "Pre-language": cooing, etc.
• Early discrimination of sounds
• Babbling
  • Experimentation with articulation
  • Matching production and perception
  • Loss of the ability of to distinguish some sounds
• Early phones; these tend to be those that are more common in languages generally, those that are easier to produce and distinguish perceptually.
• Early syllables: simplified in comparison to adult syllables.
• Words with and without phonemes. Words may be learned as unanalyzed units; the fact that a sound occurs in a single word does mean it has been learned as a phoneme in the child's system.
• The child language as a system in its own right. It is possible to analyze the child's system in terms of how it deviates from the adult system or as a system in its own right.
• Perception and production: the "fiss" phenomenon. Perception is normally ahead of production; children may hear distinctions which they cannot produce.