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