Understanding Phonology

Carlos Gussenhoven, Haike Jacobs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351974707
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Understanding Phonology, Fourth Edition provides a clear, accessible and broad introduction to Phonology. Introducing basic concepts, it provides a comprehensive account of phonological issues such as segmental contrasts; syllables and moras; quantity, tone, intonation and stress; feature geometry; and prosodic constituent structure.

This new edition has been reorganized and revised with key features including:

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• A brand new eResource at www.routledge.com/9781138961425, which contains a full answer key for all exercises, and audio recordings of illustrative examples;

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• Illustrations in languages from all six continents and all major language families, including Arabic, Mandarin, Finnish, Zulu and Hawaiian;

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• Over 140 exercises to test understanding, including new exercises involving larger data sets;

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• Revised coverage of tone, stress and opacity in OT.

Understanding Phonology is essential reading for students coming to this topic for the first time.

1
Structures in languages

1.1 Introduction

Imagine a biologist wandering in a newly discovered forest inhabited by thousands of undescribed animal species. Any research he or she takes on will yield completely new scientific data. This privileged situation is very much that of today’s phonologist. At least half of the 7,000 or so languages in the world either have sketchy accounts devoted to them or are entirely undescribed. No two languages have ever been found that have the same phonology. In fact, varieties of the same language often differ in their phonological systems, and there are therefore numerous opportunities to be the first in history to know about some phonological phenomenon. Our hope is that you will be able to derive some excitement even from the existing language data that are presented in this book and that you can see how the ways humans organize their vocal resources into grammars are quite remarkable. Admittedly, seeing those structures, whether in new or existing data, requires more than a quick look. Our general aim in this book is to guide you through the various aspects of phonological structure and indicate how they vary across languages.

Let’s begin by observing that all human languages have two co-existing structures: a phonological structure and a morphosyntactic structure. Before this point can be made, we need to make it clear what it means for languages to have ‘structure’ to begin with. In section 1.2, we discuss how languages vary in the extent to which they allow particular kinds of structure to be ‘seen’, or observed. Phonological structure is not the same as the orthography in alphabetic writing systems, and we urge you to keep the notions of ‘letter’ and ‘sound’ distinct in your thinking about pronunciation. In section 1.4, we explain what is meant by morphosyntactic structure and then move on to a thought experiment in which you are invited to imagine a world without phonological structure, a mental exercise that is intended to make you see more clearly what it is. Its independence from the morphosyntactic structure is brought out by another thought experiment, in which we imagine a world where all languages have the same phonological structure. Finally, we will make the point that all languages have phonological structures, but that sign languages express their phonological elements visually, as manual and facial gestures, rather than acoustically.

1.2 Observing Linguistic Structure

By the time he or she is five years old, every child in this world has learnt to speak a human language. Today, this event happens about 16,000 times every hour.¹ It is hard to say how many languages spoken in the world today are still being used by care-givers to communicate with their children, but one thing is certain: those languages vary greatly in their structure. Some of them will have a passive verb form, and others will not; some will have 5 vowels, some 13 and yet others 25, and likewise the number of consonants will vary greatly; some will use pitch to distinguish words (see section 2.2.4), and some will not, and so on. Children of that age are usually capable of saying that they have five fingers on each of their two hands, but if you were to ask them how many vowels their language has, your question would be royally ignored. This is not because the child does not necessarily know the meaning of the word ‘vowel’, but because the question goes well beyond what humans can naturally know. The structure of our language is not accessible to us in the way the outward shape of our body is; in fact, people are normally not even aware that their language has any structure at all.

1.2.1 Awareness of language structure

How, then, can we ever develop an awareness of that structure? In countries in which children are taught to write in an alphabetic orthography, awareness of segments typically arises because to a large extent the letters used to write words stand in some regular relationship to the sounds – we will often call them ‘segments’ – in those words. It is in fact quite a mental step to realize that an English word like tea consists of two segments, a [t] and an [iː], rather than being a single unit of sound. (The symbol [ː], known as the length mark, indicates that the preceding sound is long; see chapter 2.) In general, awareness of structural elements will depend on two factors. First, besides your natural inclination to look into such matters, there are the demands that are made on you to do so, as will happen at school. Illiterates may be unaware of the existence of segments, and it will take more than a little work to reach that understanding (Morais et al. 1979). Second, the language itself will reveal some elements of structure more readily than others. That is, the structural elements of any one language vary in ‘salience’, and it is understandably easier to become aware of more striking elements than of less striking elements. For instance, the notion ‘lexical word’ naturally develops fairly easily for speakers of most languages. Pre-school speakers of English usually know that Johnny shouted! consists of two words, and No! of one, even though they will be less sure in cases like Don’t!, shell shocked or shaggy-dog story.

1.2.2 Language diversity

But again, we must remember that languages vary, and thus also vary in the salience of comparable notions. Inuit, spoken in northern Alaska, northern Canada and western Greenland, has a complex system of suffixes and incorporates nouns with verbs: many of its words or sentences are much like Don’t!, shell shocked and shaggy-dog story. Inuit children may therefore have different intuitions about the notion ‘word’ than English children. Or again, if you ask a speaker of German how many syllables there are in a particular German word, you will typically get a quick and correct answer, but if you pose the same question to a speaker of Japanese about a Japanese word, you may well draw a blank, or get the wrong answer. This is because syllables are not particularly salient; or, rather, another structural element, smaller than the syllable, is more salient in Japanese. This is the mora (Hyman 1985), to be discussed in chapter 9. So if you want a quick answer, you should ask how many moras there are in some Japanese word. A short vowel and each ‘half’ of a long vowel are examples of moras, such that hi ‘day’ is one mora and boo ‘stick’ is two. In addition, a consonant in the coda of the syllable is a mora. In Japanese, this could be the first ‘half’ of a long consonant (a ‘geminate’), as occurring in nattoo ‘fermented soybeans’, or a nasal consonant, like [n] as in kéndoo ‘swordsmanship’. So in kéndoo there are four moras: [e], [n], [o] and another [o], just as in nattoo, where [a], the first [t], [o] and another [o] are the moras.

In general, there tend to be various generalizations in a language that make reference to salient structural elements, which may in part explain why these elements are salient and thus open to the intuition of speakers (Kubozono 1999). In Japanese, for instance, there are many ways in which the moraic structure of words is relevant to the way you pronounce them and the way they are treated. However, the syllable, too, is a structural element in Japanese. For instance, it determines the possible locations of the word accent. Japanese words are idiosyncratically either accented or unacce...