Understanding Phonology

330 Pages·2012·1.93 MB·English

Understanding
Phonology
Third edition
This page intentionally left blank
Understanding
Phonology
Third edition
Carlos Gussenhoven
and
Haike Jacobs
Understanding
Language Series
Series Editors:
Bernard Comrie
and
Greville Corbett
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 444 11204 7
First Published 2011
Impression number 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Year 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011
Copyright © 2011 Carlos Gussenhoven, Haike Jacobs
First edition published in Great Britain in 1998 by Hodder Arnold.
Second edition published in Great Britain in 2005 by Hodder Arnold.
Third edition published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder Education.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or under licence
from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Further details of such licences (for reprographic
reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited, Saffron House,
6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Cover photo © Zoran Ivanovich Photo/iStockphoto.com
Typeset by MPS Limited, a Macmillan Company
Printed in Great Britain for Hodder Education, part of Hachette UK, 338 Euston Road, London
NW1 3BH by CPI Antony Rowe.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
The IPA chart x
1. Structures in languages 1
2. The production of speech 15
3. Some typology: sameness and difference 34
4. Making the form fi t 45
5. Underlying and surface representations 61
6. Distinctive features 72
7. SPE. A case study: the diminutive suffi x in Dutch 92
8. Transparency and opacity with rules and constraints 111
9. Levels of representation 131
10. Representing tone 147
11. Between the segment and the syllable 162
12. Feature geometry 185
13. Exploiting the feature tree 198
14. Stress and feet 214
15. Further constraining stress 227
16. Phonology above the word 246
Epilogue 262
Key to questions 264
References 300
Language index 311
Subject index 316
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
There are about 6000 languages in the world today. Almost certainly, no two of them
have the same sound structure: they vary widely in the number of consonants and
vowels they have, in their use of tonal contrasts, in their stress patterns, in the shape
of their syllables, and so on. At the same time, all these languages show striking
similarities in the way they structure their sound systems. Phonology is a thriving field
of linguistic research that strives to understand the structure behind these systems.
How do these similarities arise? Or again, why is there so much variation? How is our
knowledge of the pronunciation of our language represented in our brain? How can we
describe the pronunciation of a language? What do people do when they play language
games? Why do loanwords often sound so totally different from the way they are
pronounced in the donor languages? These and many other questions are dealt with
in this book. In our discussion, we have tried to sketch the development of scientific
thinking about the sound structure of languages and to take an unbiased view of the
cognitive or physiological nature of the explanations. We hope we have succeeded in
this task in at least some places in the book, and have got close enough to this ideal for
it to serve as a reliable and relevant introduction to an important and exciting field.
This book reflects the thoughts and discoveries of many phonologists. We have
learnt to appreciate the value and implications of these theoretical positions not only
by reading their publications, but also by attending their classes and discussing the
issues with them. Needless to say, our debt to then is inestimable.
A number of people deserve thanks for providing us with data. These are Wilber
van der Beek, Barbara van den Brekel, Aoju Chen, Frederic Gaggeri, Kees Groenewoud,
Jandranka Gvozdanhovic´, Özden Heebink-Mandaci, Joost Kremers, Eric Kellerman, Aditi
Lahiri, Will Leben, Manjari Ohala, Michael Redford, Leo Wetzels and Young-mee Yu Cho.
The second edition of this book benefited from the comments made by Elan
Dresher, San Duanmu, Ed Flemming, Ingmar Steiner, Bo Hagström, Victoria Rosén,
Rik van Gijn, Jeroen van der Weijer, Leo Wetzels, Maria Wolters and those who
responded to the publisher’s questionnaire.
In this third edition, we have made a number of additions and in part rearranged
the old text. The new Chapter 1 places our subject in a more general scientific
context. It includes the first half of the old Chapter 2 on the difference between
morphosyntactic structure and phonological structure. Chapter 2 is essentially the
old Chapter 1, while Chapter 3 is a revised version of old Chapter 2. Chapter 8 is again
largely new and deals with responses to phonological opacity in Optimality Theory.
Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands 2011
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
The International Phonetics Alphabet (2005) is reproduced by kind permission of
the International Phonetic Association (Department of Theoretical and Applied
Linguistics, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki
54124, Greece).
The authors would like to thank Janine Berns, Hyong-Sil Cho, Bert Cranen, Anne
Cutler, Marinda Hagen, Robert Kennedy, Hikaru Osawa and Henning Reetz for their
help with this third edition.