HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Phonology is the branch of
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...
that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any
linguistic analysis In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. François & Ponsonnet (2013). All acad ...
either: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement, location, and handshape. At first, a separate terminology was used for the study of sign phonology ('chereme' instead of 'phoneme', etc.), but the concepts are now considered to apply universally to all human languages.


Terminology

The word 'phonology' (as in ' phonology of English') can refer either to the field of study or to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems that a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax, its morphology and its vocabulary. The word ''phonology'' comes from Ancient Greek , ''phōnḗ'', "voice, sound," and the suffix '' -logy'' (which is from Greek , ''lógos'', "word, speech, subject of discussion"). Phonology is typically distinguished from phonetics, which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and
perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
of the sounds or signs of language. Phonology describes the way they function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics and phonology to theoretical linguistics, but establishing the phonological system of a language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence in some theories. Note that the distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid-20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception, which result in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology. Definitions of the field of phonology vary. Nikolai Trubetzkoy in ''Grundzüge der Phonologie'' (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language," as opposed to phonetics, which is "the study of sound pertaining to the act of speech" (the distinction between ''language'' and ''speech'' being basically Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between ''langue'' and ''parole'').Trubetzkoy N., ''Grundzüge der Phonologie'' (published 1939), translated by C. Baltaxe as
Principles of Phonology
', University of California Press, 1969
More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, and in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behavior and organization of sounds as linguistic items." According to Clark ''et al.'' (2007), it means the systematic use of
sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by ...
to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying that use.


History

Early evidence for a systematic study of the sounds in a language appears in the 4th century BCE '' Ashtadhyayi'', a Sanskrit grammar composed by
Pāṇini , era = ;;6th–5th century BCE , region = Indian philosophy , main_interests = Grammar, linguistics , notable_works = ' ( Classical Sanskrit) , influenced= , notable_ideas= Descriptive linguistics (Devana ...
. In particular, the '' Shiva Sutras'', an auxiliary text to the ''Ashtadhyayi'', introduces what may be considered a list of the phonemes of Sanskrit, with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology, syntax and semantics.
Ibn Jinni Abū l-Fatḥ ʿUthmān ibn Jinnī, best known as Ibn Jinnī (), was a specialist on Arabic grammar, a philologist, and a philosopher of language. He was born in Mosul to a Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greec ...
of Mosul, a pioneer in phonology, wrote prolifically in the 10th century on
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
morphology and phonology in works such as ''
Kitāb Al-Munṣif Kitab ( ar, کتاب, link=no, ''kitāb''), also transcribed kitaab, is the Arabic, Turkic, Urdu, Hindi and in various Indian Languages word for "book". * ''Kitaab'', a 1977 Hindi language movie * ''Kithaab'' (also written ''Kitab''), a 2018 Ma ...
,
Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab Kitab ( ar, کتاب, link=no, ''kitāb''), also transcribed kitaab, is the Arabic, Turkic, Urdu, Hindi and in various Indian Languages word for "book". * ''Kitaab'', a 1977 Hindi language movie * ''Kithaab'' (also written ''Kitab''), a 2018 Ma ...
,'' and '' ''. The study of phonology as it exists today is defined by the formative studies of the 19th-century Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, who (together with his students Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba in the Kazan School) shaped the modern usage of the term '' phoneme'' in a series of lectures in 1876–1877. The word ''phoneme'' had been coined a few years earlier, in 1873, by the French linguist
A. Dufriche-Desgenettes Antoni Dufriche-Desgenettes (26 February 1804, Paris – 19 December 1878, Saint-Mandé), baptized ''Antoine Marie Dufriche-Foulaines'', was a French seafaring merchant, poet and amateur phonetician. Biography His father François Nicolas, a broth ...
. In a paper read at 24 May meeting of the Société de Linguistique de Paris, Dufriche-Desgenettes proposed for ''phoneme'' to serve as a one-word equivalent for the German ''Sprachlaut''. Baudouin de Courtenay's subsequent work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of phonetic alternations (what is now called allophony and
morphophonology Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes ...
) and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure, according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was the Prague school. One of its leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose ''Grundzüge der Phonologie'' (''Principles of Phonology''), published posthumously in 1939, is among the most important works in the field from that period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of
morphophonology Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes ...
, but the concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the '' archiphoneme''. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century. Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics also contributed with a focus on linguistic structure independent of phonetic realization or semantics. In 1968, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published '' The Sound Pattern of English'' (SPE), the basis for generative phonology. In that view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. The features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set and have the binary values + or −. There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so-called surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the generativists folded
morphophonology Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes ...
into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and, more explicitly, in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes that interact with one another; those that are active and those that are suppressed is language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously, but the output of one process may be the input to another. The second most prominent natural phonologist is Patricia Donegan, Stampe's wife; there are many natural phonologists in Europe and a few in the US, such as Geoffrey Nathan. The principles of natural phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded natural morphology. In 1976, John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as operating on ''one'' linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations but rather as involving ''some parallel sequences'' of features that reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved into feature geometry, which became the standard theory of representation for theories of the organization of phonology as different as lexical phonology and optimality theory.
Government phonology Government Phonology (GP) is a theoretical framework of linguistics, and more specifically of phonology. The framework aims to provide a non-arbitrary account for phonological phenomena by replacing the rule component of SPE-type phonology with w ...
, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary
parameter A parameter (), generally, is any characteristic that can help in defining or classifying a particular system (meaning an event, project, object, situation, etc.). That is, a parameter is an element of a system that is useful, or critical, when ...
s. That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, but parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures in this field include Jonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud,
Monik Charette Monik Charette (born 29 May 1957) is a French-Canadian linguist and phonologist who taught at SOAS the University of London, in the United Kingdom. She specializes in phonology, morphophonology, stress systems, vowel harmony, syllabic structure ...
, and John Harris. In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed optimality theory, an overall architecture for phonology according to which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints ordered by importance; a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince and has become a dominant trend in phonology. The appeal to phonetic grounding of constraints and representational elements (e.g. features) in various approaches has been criticized by proponents of 'substance-free phonology', especially by Mark Hale and Charles Reiss. An integrated approach to phonological theory that combines synchronic and diachronic accounts to sound patterns was initiated with Evolutionary Phonology in recent years.


Analysis of phonemes

An important part of traditional, pre-generative schools of phonology is studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes. For example, in English, the "p" sound in ''pot'' is aspirated (pronounced ) while that in ''spot'' is not aspirated (pronounced ). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations ( allophones) of the same phonological category, that is of the phoneme . (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated were interchanged with the unaspirated in ''spot'', native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same" .) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes. For example, in Thai,
Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
, and Quechua, there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration is the only contrasting feature (two words can have different meanings but with the only difference in pronunciation being that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated one). Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for deciding whether two sounds should be assigned to the same phoneme. However, other considerations often need to be taken into account as well. The particular contrasts which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, and , two sounds that have the same place and manner of articulation and differ in voicing only, were allophones of the same phoneme in English, but later came to belong to separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics. The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicate the traditional and somewhat intuitive idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as the same phoneme. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly co-articulated, so it is problematic to expect to be able to splice words into simple segments without affecting speech perception. Different linguists therefore take different approaches to the problem of assigning sounds to phonemes. For example, they differ in the extent to which they require allophones to be phonetically similar. There are also differing ideas as to whether this grouping of sounds is purely a tool for linguistic analysis, or reflects an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language. Since the early 1960s, theoretical linguists have moved away from the traditional concept of a phoneme, preferring to consider basic units at a more abstract level, as a component of
morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...
s; these units can be called ''morphophonemes'', and analysis using this approach is called
morphophonology Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes ...
.


Other topics

In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, or replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme ( allomorphs, as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress, feature geometry, tone, and intonation. Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in a given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of phonological rules, sometimes in a given order that can be feeding or bleeding,Goldsmith 1995:1.) as well as prosody, the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of
modality Modality may refer to: Humanities * Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations * Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales * Modaliti ...
because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been applied to the analysis of sign languages (see Phonemes in sign languages), even though the sublexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds.


See also

* Accent (sociolinguistics) *
Absolute neutralisation In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
*
Cherology In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
* English phonology * List of phonologists (also : Phonologists) *
Morphophonology Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes ...
* Phoneme * Phonological development * Phonological hierarchy *
Prosody (linguistics) In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, s ...
* Phonotactics * Second language phonology * Phonological rule *
Neogrammarian The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound chang ...


Notes


Bibliography

* Anderson, John M.; and Ewen, Colin J. (1987). ''Principles of dependency phonology''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * * Bloomfield, Leonard. (1933). ''Language''. New York: H. Holt and Company. (Revised version of Bloomfield's 1914 ''An introduction to the study of language''). * Brentari, Diane (1998). ''A prosodic model of sign language phonology.'' Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publ ...
. * Chomsky, Noam. (1964). Current issues in linguistic theory. In J. A. Fodor and J. J. Katz (Eds.), ''The structure of language: Readings in the philosophy language'' (pp. 91–112). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. * Chomsky, Noam; and Halle, Morris. (1968). ''The sound pattern of English''. New York: Harper & Row. * * Clements, George N.; and Samuel J. Keyser. (1983). ''CV phonology: A generative theory of the syllable''. Linguistic inquiry monographs (No. 9). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (pbk); (hbk). * * Donegan, Patricia. (1985). On the Natural Phonology of Vowels. New York: Garland. . * * * Goldsmith, John A. (1979). The aims of autosegmental phonology. In D. A. Dinnsen (Ed.), ''Current approaches to phonological theory'' (pp. 202–222). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. * Goldsmith, John A. (1989). ''Autosegmental and metrical phonology: A new synthesis''. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. * * Gussenhoven, Carlos & Jacobs, Haike. "Understanding Phonology", Hodder & Arnold, 1998. 2nd edition 2005. * * * Halle, Morris. (1959). ''The sound pattern of Russian''. The Hague: Mouton. * Harris, Zellig. (1951). ''Methods in structural linguistics''. Chicago: Chicago University Press. * Hockett, Charles F. (1955). ''A manual of phonology''. Indiana University publications in anthropology and linguistics, memoirs II. Baltimore: Waverley Press. * * * Jakobson, Roman; Fant, Gunnar; and Halle, Morris. (1952). ''Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. * Kaisse, Ellen M.; and Shaw, Patricia A. (1985). On the theory of lexical phonology. In E. Colin and J. Anderson (Eds.), ''Phonology Yearbook 2'' (pp. 1–30). * Kenstowicz, Michael. ''Phonology in generative grammar''. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. * Ladefoged, Peter. (1982). ''A course in phonetics'' (2nd ed.). London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. * * * Napoli, Donna Jo (1996). ''Linguistics: An Introduction''. New York: Oxford University Press. * * Sandler, Wendy and Lillo-Martin, Diane. 2006. ''Sign language and linguistic universals''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press * * * de Saussure, Ferdinand. (1916). ''Cours de linguistique générale''. Paris: Payot. * Stampe, David. (1979). ''A dissertation on natural phonology''. New York: Garland. * * * Trubetzkoy, Nikolai. (1939). ''Grundzüge der Phonologie''. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 7. * Twaddell, William F. (1935). On defining the phoneme. Language monograph no. 16. ''Language''.


External links

* {{Authority control +