Phonology (formerly alsophonemics orphonematics[1][2][3][4][a]) is the branch oflinguistics that studies how languages systematically organize theirphonemes or, forsign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particularlanguage variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to anylinguistic analysis either:
all levels of language in which sound or signs are structured to conveylinguistic meaning.[9]
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.[10] 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 allhuman languages.
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.[11] This is one of the fundamental systems that a language is considered to comprise, like itssyntax, itsmorphology and itslexicon. The wordphonology comes fromAncient Greekφωνή,phōnḗ, 'voice, sound', and the suffix-logy (which is from Greekλόγος,lógos, 'word, speech, subject of discussion').
Phonology is typically distinguished fromphonetics, which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission andperception of the sounds or signs of language.[12][13] Phonology describes the way they function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs todescriptive linguistics and phonology totheoretical linguistics, but establishing the phonological system of a language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence in some theories. The distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of thephoneme in the mid-20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such aspsycholinguistics andspeech perception, which result in specific areas likearticulatory phonology orlaboratory phonology.
Definitions of the field of phonology vary.Nikolai Trubetzkoy inGrundzüge 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 betweenlanguage andspeech being basicallyFerdinand de Saussure's distinction betweenlangue andparole).[14] 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."[12] According to Clarket al. (2007), it means the systematic use ofsound to encode meaning in any spokenhuman language, or the field of linguistics studying that use.[15]
Evidence for a systematic investigation of the sounds of a language appears in the 4th c. BCE Ashtadhyayi, a Sanskrit grammar by Pāṇini. Particularly, within the Shiva Sutras, auxiliary work to the Ashtadhyayi, an inventory of what would be construed as a list of the phonemes of Sanskrit is provided, with a notational scheme for them which is deployed throughout the main text, which concern itself with issues of morphology, syntax and semantics.
The study of phonology as it exists today is defined by the formative studies of the 19th-century Polish scholarJan Baudouin de Courtenay,[17]: 17 who (together with his studentsMikołaj Kruszewski andLev Shcherba in theKazan School) shaped the modern usage of the termphoneme in a series of lectures in 1876–1877. The wordphoneme had been coined a few years earlier, in 1873, by the French linguistA. Dufriche-Desgenettes. In a paper read at 24 May meeting of theSociété de Linguistique de Paris,[18] Dufriche-Desgenettes proposed forphoneme to serve as a one-word equivalent for the GermanSprachlaut.[19] 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 calledallophony andmorphophonology) and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure, according toE. F. K. Koerner.[20]
Nikolai Trubetzkoy, 1920s
An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was thePrague school. One of its leading members was PrinceNikolai Trubetzkoy, whoseGrundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology),[14] 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 ofmorphophonology, but the concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of thearchiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school wasRoman Jakobson, one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century.Louis Hjelmslev'sglossematics also contributed with a focus on linguistic structure independent of phonetic realization or semantics.[17]: 175
In 1968,Noam Chomsky andMorris Halle publishedThe Sound Pattern of English (SPE), the basis forgenerative phonology. In that view, phonological representations are sequences ofsegments made up ofdistinctive 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 howunderlying 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 foldedmorphophonology 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 universalphonological 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 ondistinctive features withinprosodic 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 tomorphology byWolfgang U. Dressler, who founded natural morphology.
In 1976,John Goldsmith introducedautosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as operating onone linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations but rather as involvingsome parallel sequences of features that reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved intofeature geometry, which became the standard theory of representation for theories of the organization of phonology as different as lexical phonology andoptimality theory.
Government phonology, 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 ofprinciples and vary according to their selection of certain binaryparameters. 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 includeJonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud,Monik Charette, and John Harris.
In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991,Alan Prince andPaul Smolensky developedoptimality 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 byJohn McCarthy andAlan 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 byMark Hale andCharles Reiss.[21][22]
An integrated approach to phonological theory that combines synchronic and diachronic accounts to sound patterns was initiated withEvolutionary Phonology in recent years.[23]
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 asphonemes. For example, in English, the "p" sound inpot isaspirated (pronounced[pʰ]) while that inspot is not aspirated (pronounced[p]). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones, which cannot give origin tominimal pairs) of the same phonological category, that is of the phoneme/p/. (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated[pʰ] were interchanged with the unaspirated[p] inspot, native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same"/p/.) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes. For example, inThai,Bengali, andQuechua, there areminimal 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).
The vowels of modern (Standard)Arabic (left) and (Israeli)Hebrew (right) from the phonemic point of view. Note the intersection of the two circles—the distinction between shorta,i andu is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid articulation of short vowels, while Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel length.The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonetic point of view. The two circles are totally separate—none of the vowel-sounds made by speakers of one language is made by speakers of the other.
Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetictranscriptions of the speech ofnative 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,[f] and[v], two sounds that have the same place and manner of articulation and differ in voicing only, wereallophones 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 inhistorical 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 ofmorphemes; these units can be calledmorphophonemes, and analysis using this approach is calledmorphophonology.
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, andintonation.
The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently ofmodality 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 (seePhonemes in sign languages), even though the sublexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds.
^Depending on usage, there may or may not be a distinction betweenphonology andphonemics/phonematics, the latter of which are more strictly about segments (consonants andvowels) rather thansuprasegmentals (syllables,length,accent,tone,intonation, etc.). Synonymy between these terms is favored by some Americanstructuralist phonologists (or rather, phonemicists)[2][3][5][6][7][8] and is reflected inmorphophonology/morphophonemics, among other derivatives.
^Buck, Carl Darling (January 1945). ""Phonemics" versus "Phonematics"".Classical Philology.40 (1). University of Chicago: 47.Professor Whatmough's assault on the terms "phonemic" and "phonemics" seemed to me, as to others, pedantic. So it is a pleasure to discover that his antipathy to these now well-established terms is not so deep rooted and consistent as one would suppose from his words inCP, XXXVIII (1943), 211: "Nobody saysmathemics instead ofmathematics; and I, for one, do not say, and never shall,phonemics forphonematics orphonemic forphonematic." In happening to re-read an earlier article of his in theMélanges linguistiques offerts à M. Holger Pedersen (1937),. I find him beginning a sentence (p. 46) "Ideally the phonemic system of a language. . . . ."
^abTrask (1996, p. 267): "phonemics/fəˈniːmɪks/n. [obsolescent] 1. Any procedure for identifying thephonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly alsophonematics) A former synonym forphonology, often preferred by theAmerican Structuralists and reflecting the importance in structuralist work of phonemics in sense 1."
^abTrask (1996, p. 264): "phonematics/fəʊnɪˈmætɪks/n. 1. [obsolete] An old synonym forphonemics (sense 2)."
^Trauth, Gregory; Kazzazi, Kerstin, eds. (1998). "phonemics".Hadumod Bussmann Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft [Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics]. Translated by Trauth, Gregory; Kazzazi, Kerstin. Routledge. p. 892.1 Synonym forphonology. 2 Because of the historical connotations that since the time of the Neogrammarians were attached to the termphonology, which today is used for synchronic and diachronic studies, 'phonemics' was first used by the American structuralists for 'synchronic phonology.' This designation was also meant to distinguish the American structuralist approach from that of the European structuralists, especially those of thePrague School.
^Crystal, David, ed. (2008). "phoneme".A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (6th ed.). Blackwell Publishing. p. 362.ISBN978-1-4051-5296-9.On this general basis, several approaches tophonemic analysis, orphonemics, have developed. [...] Apart from the question of definition, if the view is taken that all aspects of the sound system of a language can be analysed in terms of phonemes – that is, thesuprasegmental as well as thesegmental features – then 'phonemics' becomes equivalent to phonology (=phonemic phonology). This view was particularly common in later developments of the Americanstructuralist tradition of linguistic analysis, where linguists adopting this 'phonemic principle' were calledphonemicists. Many phonologists, however (particularly in the British tradition), prefer not to analyse suprasegmental features in terms of phonemes, and have developed approaches which do without the phoneme altogether ('nonphonemic phonology', as inprosodic anddistinctive feature theories).
^Richards, Jack Croft;Schmidt, Richard, eds. (2010). "phonemicsnphonemicadj".Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics (4th ed.). Pearson Education. p. 433.ISBN978-1-4082-0460-3.The term "phonemics" has been used by American linguists, particularly instructural linguistics. Lately, the termphonology has been preferred.
^Brown, Keith;Miller, Jim, eds. (2013). "phonemics".The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. p. 340.ISBN978-0-521-76675-3.The term used by American structuralists forphonology, indicating the central position of the phoneme in their analyses.
^Stokoe, William C. (1978) [1960].Sign Language Structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf. Department of Anthropology and Linguistics, University at Buffalo. Studies in linguistics, Occasional papers. Vol. 8 (2nd ed.). Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press.
^Anon (probablyLouis Havet). (1873) "Sur la nature des consonnes nasales".Revue critique d'histoire et de littérature 13, No. 23, p. 368.
^Roman Jakobson,Selected Writings: Word and Language, Volume 2, Walter de Gruyter, 1971, p. 396.
^E. F. K. Koerner,Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and Development of His Linguistic Thought in Western Studies of Language. A contribution to the history and theory of linguistics, Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn [Oxford & Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press], 1973.
^Hale, Mark; Reiss, Charles (2008).The Phonological Enterprise. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-953397-8.
^Hale, Mark; Reiss, Charles (2000). "'Substance abuse' and 'dysfunctionalism': Current trends in phonology".Linguistic Inquiry.31 (1):157–169.JSTOR4179099.
^Blevins, Juliette. 2004.Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge University Press.
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