history of phonology with an emphasis on recent history
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History of Phonology
with an emphasis on recent history
1900-1930
Development of Phonetics are a special branch of linguistics
Unlike historical linguistics, also concerned with sounds through its preoccupation with sound change, phonetics was firmly rooted in synchronic analysis
Articulatory phonetics Acoustic phonetics
new tools
spectrograph X-ray photo’s (and films) sound recordings
Phonology
Off-shoot of phonetics Strictly devoted to those aspects of sound
structure which are linguistically relevant E.g. pitch differences related to tone or
accent are phonologically important, pitch differences related to sex are not
First International Congress of Linguists in The Hague in 1928 is often viewed as the beginning of phonology, set off by
Prague school
definition of phoneme importance of binary oppositions marked vs unmarked member of pair neutralization languages are ‘systems’: you can’t take out
one thing and study it separately – that way you lose information about various contrasts within the language
Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy 1890-1938
Roman Jakobson1896-1982
Jakobson’s accomplishments
wide-ranging scholar worked on Russian case, phonological
theory, poetics, and numerous other topics introduced the Prague school to the USA integrated work on language acquisition and
language loss by aphasia in linguistic theory
Generative phonology
Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky started working on phonology in the 1950’s
Culminating in The Sound Pattern of English (1968)
Morris Halle
Morris Halle, continued student of Roman Jakobson likewise of Russian (actually, Latvian)
descent worked primarily on Slavic and English in his The Sound Pattern of Russian, Halle
attacked the classical phoneme with Chomsky, developed generative
phonology (1956-1968; after 1968 Chomsky stopped doing phonology)
The Sound Pattern of English 1968 Authors: Chomsky and Halle Should have been: Halle and Chomsky Important for its formalization of phonological
representations, rules, and its methodology Discusses many major issues in the
phonology of English, including phonotactics, phonological rules, and stress assignment in underived, derived and compound words
Segments
defined as a “bundle of features” e.g.: feature-1 + feature-2 - feature-3 + feature-4 - etc.
Features have a standard phonetic interpretation, in terms of articulation (Jakobson had proposed an acoustic interpretation)
One exception to binary features To capture four levels of stress, Chomsky
and Halle used numeral values for stress features: [1 stress], [2 stress], [3 stress] and [4 stress]
So features, in SPE, come in 2 types: boolean valued features (+/-) numerically valued features
Rules
context-sensitive rules A → B / C __ D however, not involving whole segments, but
features, or sets of features many new notational devices were
introduced, to formulate rules: α notation, curly brace notation, etc.
Methodology
economy basic principle feature-counting evaluation metric highly abstract underlying forms complex derivations, involving the
phonological cycle phonotactics done by rule synchronic analysis became a mirror of
diachronic analysis in SPE
E.g.
Dutch has no diphtongs before /r/ Historical account: diphtongization never took
place before /r/ Possible synchronic account: assume
diphtongs are underlying monophongs, and diphtongize them unless followed by /r/
Advantages: reduces the inventory of underlying segments (economy), and derives the phonotactic generalization
Disadvantages
Need to use exception features, e.g. for loans that came into the language after the sound change (minuut, titel)
Mixes up diachrony and synchrony Overly abstract: learnability issue
Reactions to SPE
immediate and wide following many phonologists embraced the
methodology, notation and ideas, to describe phonological problems in a variety of languages, thus creating the field of generative phonology
However, there was also an immediate backlash Abstractness: natural phonology (David
Stampe, Patricia Donegan, Theo Vennemann, Joan Bybee (Hooper))
Morphology: new separation of word-based sound regularities from general sound regularities (Mark Aronoff, Paul Kiparsky)
Autosegmental phonology: explosion of the segment (John Goldsmith, Nick Clements, etc.)
Abstractness
Need for absolute neutralization? Absolute neutralization: underlying form
never shows up as surface form In SPE, this was a common phenomenon Learnability problem: only if children use the
same methodology as Chomsky and Halle, will they arrive at the same underlying forms
Autosegmental phonology
originated in the study of tone languages, where it was noted that
tonal features (like High Tone) may stretch over many segments, sometimes entire words
and when they change, e.g. through assimilation, all segments bearing the tone change
Suggestion (Goldsmith)
get rid of the absolute slicing hypothesis put tonal features on a separate level (called
tier), and then connect them to the various segments bearing the tonal features
allow the connection to be not one-to-one, but many-to-many
So,
One segment may bear two tones (e.g. Hi-Lo, heard as falling tone and Lo-Hi, heard as rising)
And one tone may be connected to many segments
Notation
Hi Lo
C V C
Tonal tier:
Segmentaltier
Floating tones
are tonal features not (yet) associated with a segment
can be linked in the course of a derivation may be separate morpheme or originate through deletion of a segment