Phonology 1                             Winter 2001                                         John Goldsmith

 

Textbook: A Course in Phonology, by Iggy Roca and Wyn Johnson (Publisher: Basil Blackwell),

plus A Workbook in Phonology by the same authors.

 

 

Week

Topic

Read during this week at least:

Homework due the following week.

1 (half a week)

Overview of the course

Phonetics and phonology: Phonetics as the study of physical properties involved in linguistic sounds (articulatory, acoustic); phonology as the study of the distribution of symbolic representations of speech sounds.

Our goal is to find the smallest set of symbols that can naturally represent the pronunciation of all words in a language. (=phonemes)

Secondarily, we wish to make explicit what further restrictions are operative in the language which limit the combination and distribution of sounds. In other words, why are dog and cat OK, but not tlkps?

Phonemes: Two sounds are contrastive if we find a minimal pair differing only by that pair. Two sounds are in complementary distribution if we can define phonologically the context in which each appears, and the two do not overlap. This is a strong clue that the two sounds are closely related, most likely as realizations of the same phoneme. Why are humans so good at this task? [This criterion fails (or seems to fail?) in the case of a language in which vowels and consonants strictly alternate. Why?]

Chapters 1-2

Wild sounds exercise (see below).

Workbook exercises 2.1 Japanese, 2.2 German.

Textbook p 30, exercises a,b,c.

2

a. Two views: (i) a phoneme corresponds to a set of phones, and it is nothing but that correspondence. (ii) A phoneme is an abstract representation of a sound realization; it is mapped to various realizations by rules.

b. Introduction to phonetics (Chapters 1, 2A) Much of this you already know if you took Phonetics (as most of you have).

Chapters 3-4

Flap exercise (see below).

Page 57 of textbook: Catalan and English exercises.

 

3

a. Sonorants (Chapter 3)

b. Beginning of Chapter 4: Distinctive features

Chapters 4-5

Textbook p. 83, Odd One Out exercise. Also p. 84, both exercises. Workbook: p. 17 Ex. 2.3 on Dutch; p. 18, Ex. 2.4 on Yiddish.

 

4

Distribution and natural classes

Chapter 5

Textbook p. 112-113 All exercises.

Workbook p. 22, Ex. 2.8 Tahltan coronals.

5

Chapter 5: Vowels.

Quiz this week.

 

Chapter 6

Textbook p. 141-2: all exercises.

 

6

Chapter 6

a. High, low, back, round, ATR, radical; feature dependencies (labial);

b. Back harmony in Turkish: assimilation as autosegmental spreading; cases of spreading limited to segments not associated (i.e., blocking when specified). No crossing of association lines. (German umlaut, English).

Chapter 7; Goldsmith Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology: pp. 298-309.

Textbook p. 167-8: all exercises. Workbook p. 24, Ex. 2.10 on Cheremis.

7

Chapter 7: Vowels of English: Read this, but we'll discuss this only briefly insofar as it deals with British English. We'll discuss some American English vowel properties.

Chapter 8: Vowel length and the English Great Vowel Shift

Chapter 8 and 9

Textbook p. 202-3: all exercises.

p. 229-31: all exercises.

Workbook,p. 21, Ex. 2.7 on Akan.

 

8

Chapter 9: The syllable.

a. Sequential distributional generalizations. Sonority. A system with one sonority distinction.

b. A third sonority category used sequentially: the coda. Length distinction. Complex onset. Sonority sequencing, sonority distance.

 

Textbook p. 259-260: all exercises. Workbook p. 69, Ex. 6.1 on German.

9

An overview of some current theories you'll see at conferences, including optimality theory.

 

 

10

Review and retrospective overview.

 

 

Exam

 

 

 

 

 

Phonology is based on the same hypothesis that makes alphabetic writing possible: the hypothesis

(i) that  we can establish a set of symbols (e.g., letters) which can be attached to one another in a very limited number of ways (e.g., affixed in left-to-right order in a line);

(ii) that there will be reasonable ways to link these representations both to meaningful utterances and to actual utterances;

(iii) that we can make sense out of the conflicting desires that lead us to (a) make the number of symbols large enough (the set of symbols rich enough) to represent the actual range of ways in which people speak, but also (b) make the number of symbols small enough to account for our knowledge that it's still one and the same word (etc.) even if it's pronounced in many different ways.

 

Read that a couple of times ove the course of the quarter.

 

 

Wild sounds exercise: Make a list of as many words as you can (at least 5!—try for 15) which include sounds that are aliens to the sound system of English, such as the words which we sometimes spell tsk-tsk¸ mm-hmm, or uh-oh.  Explain very briefly what's wrong with these sounds or words. If your English isn't up to this, do it in your native language and explain enough of what's going on so I can understand.

What restrictions are there on these sounds? Are these sounds actually sounds of English? Why or why not? Can you find persuasive arguments in both directions, and if so, what do you want us to do?

 

Flap exercise: T and Flap (American English).

            Note: Get and use a dictionary if you have trouble hearing the difference between a stressed and an unstressed syllable. In what follows, mark a stressed vowel as a vowel with an acute accent on it (e.g., á).

1. In this question, consider only t's and flaps which are word-internal, that is, that are neither the first nor last sound of the word they belong to.

            Make two columns down a page, and in one column, list at least 20 words with a flap in them (represent that as a D), and in the other, list at least 20 words with a t in them. Attempt to give a principle that predicts whether a particular t will be pronounced as a t or a flap, and say which of your examples your principle works for, and which ones it fails for. Be sure to think about stress.

            What consonants can precede a t in English? What consonants can follow? Be sure to think about that question in thinking about this problem.

 

            2. In what follows, consider the pronunciation of words both when they are pronounced in isolation (they form the entire utterance) and when they are part of a sentence. Can the t in Topeka ever be pronounced as a flap? How about in Thomas? Do you have an idea why? How does this bear on your conclusions in question 1?

 

            3. Can the t in planet ever be pronounced as a flap? Is that the same or different from the behavior of the t in planetarium?