Understanding Phonology

298 Pages·2017·4.33 MB·Understanding Language

by  Carlos Gussenhoven, Haike Jacobs

Understanding Phonology
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; quan­
tity, tone, intonation and stress; feature geometry; and prosodic constituent structure.
This new edition has been reorganized and revised with key features including:
• A brand new eResource at www.routledge.com/9781138961425, which contains
a full answer key for all exercises, and audio recordings of illustrative examples;
• Illustrations in languages from all six continents and all major language fami­
lies, including Arabic, Mandarin, Finnish, Zulu and Hawaiian;
• Over 140 exercises to test understanding, including new exercises involving
larger data sets;
• Revised coverage of tone, stress and opacity in OT.
Understanding Phonology is essential reading for students coming to this topic for
the first time.
Carlos Gussenhoven is emeritus professor of general and experimental phonology at
Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Haike Jacobs is professor of French linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen,
Netherlands.
Understanding Language Series
Series Editors:
Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Greville Corbett, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, UK
The Understanding Language series provides approachable, yet authoritative,
introductions to major topics in linguistics. Ideal for students with little or no prior
knowledge of linguistics, each book carefully explains the basics, emphasizing
understanding of the essential notions rather than arguing for a particular theoreti­
cal position.
Other titles in the series:
Understanding Pragmatics
Gunter Senft
Understanding Child Language Acquisition
Caroline Rowland
Understanding Semantics, Second Edition
Sebastian Löbner
Understanding Syntax, Fourth Edition
Maggie Tallerman
Understanding Phonetics
Patricia Ashby
Understanding Morphology, Second Edition
Martin Haspelmath and Andrea D. Sims
Understanding Language Testing
Dan Douglas
Understanding Second Language Acquisition
Lourdes Ortega
Study Skills for Linguistics
Jeanette Sakel
Understanding Language Change
Kate Burridge and Alexander Bergs
Understanding Phonology, Fourth Edition
Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs
For more information on any of these titles, or to order, go to
www.routledge.com/series/ULAN
Understanding
Phonology
Fourth edition
Carlos Gussenhoven
and Haike Jacobs
Fourth edition published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs
The right of Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs to be identified as authors of this work has been
asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Hodder Arnold 1998
Third edition published by Routledge 2013
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gussenhoven, Carlos, 1946- author. | Jacobs, Haike, 1961- author.
Title: Understanding phonology / Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs.
Description: Fourth Edition. | Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY :
Routledge, [2017] | Series: Understanding language series | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036736| ISBN 9781138961418 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138961425 (pbk.) |
ISBN 9781315267982 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Grammar, Comparative and general—Phonology.
Classification: LCC P217 .G867 2017 | DDC 414—dc23
LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036736
ISBN: 978-1-138-96141-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-96142-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-26798-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Minion Pro and Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Visit the eResource: www.routledge.com/9781138961425
Contents
Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
The IPA chart ix
1 Structures in languages 1
2 The production of speech 17
3 Some typology: sameness and difference 36
4 Making the form fit 48
5 Distinctive features 64
6 Describing places of articulation 76
7 Connecting underlying and surface representations 94
8 Levels of representation 109
9 Between the segment and the syllable 126
10 Tones 148
11 Word stress 174
12 Phonology above the word 200
13 Transparency and opacity with rules and constraints 215
14 Feature geometry 232
References 259
Language index 273
Subject index 281
Preface
There are about 7,000 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 strik­
ing similarities in the way they structure their sound systems. Phonology is a thriv­
ing field of linguistic research that strives to understand the structure behind these
systems. How do these similarities arise? And why, at the same time, is there so
much variation? How is our knowledge of the pronunciation of our language rep­
resented 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 them is inestimable.
A number of people deserve thanks for providing us with data for the first edi­
tion (1998). These are Aoju Chen, Frederic Gaggeri, Kees Groenewoud, Jadranka
Gvozdanović, Özden Heebink-Mandaci, Eric Kellerman, Joost Kremers, Aditi
Lahiri, Will Leben, Manjari Ohala, Michael Redford, Barbara van den Brekel,
Wilber van der Beek, Leo Wetzels and Young-mee Yu Cho.
The second edition (2005) of this book benefited from the comments made by
Elan Dresher, San Duanmu, Ed Flemming, Bo Hagström, Victoria Rosén, Ingmar
Steiner, Rik van Gijn, Jeroen van de Weijer, Leo Wetzels, Maria Wolters and those
who responded to the publisher’s questionnaire.
In the third edition (2011), we made a number of additions and in part rear­
ranged the old text. A new chapter 1 was added to place our subject in a more
general scientific context. It was expanded with 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 the
old chapter 2. Chapter 8 was added in order to deal with responses to phonological
Preface vii
opacity in Optimality Theory. 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.
The main conceptual change in this fourth edition (2017) is a more consistent
autosegmental treatment of three classes of segments (vowels, consonants and
tones) and of their inclusion in the prosodic structure. This has led to a rearrange­
ment of the chapters on syllables, tone and stress, as well as a rewriting of the last
two of these chapters. While the functional roles of tones are emphasized through­
out the discussion, as a class of segments tones are treated in a single chapter on
lexical and intonational tones. The chapter on stress has been expanded and deals
with typological issues as much as with theoretical accounts. These rewritings have
benefited from the review by David Deterding in JIPA 43 (2013). In addition, we have
split the chapter on distinctive features into two, so that students will experience
a more even workload across chapters. The new chapter 5 deals with the major-
class, laryngeal and manner features, while chapter 6 treats place features and
includes the rule format conventions that in earlier editions were discussed in a
chapter on Dutch diminutives. That chapter has been discarded in this edition. The
chapter on underlying and surface representations is now immediately followed
by the chapter on Lexical Phonology. Finally, we have collapsed the two chapters
on feature geometry into one, and reduced the discussion on opacity. The chapters
on opacity and feature geometry are the last chapters in the book. As a result of
these changes, the number of chapters has been reduced from 16 to 14. We thank
Mirjam Broersma, Hyong Sil Cho, Bernard Comrie, Grev Corbett, Catia Cucchiarini,
Gunnar Holmstedt, Judith Hanssen, Beste Kamali, Hamed Rahmani, Makiko
Sadakata and Leo Wetzels for comments on a draft version and help with data.
Finally, it was an unspeakably reassuring experience to find Helen Tredget and
Katherine Wetzel skilfully seeing our manuscript through production.
Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs
Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
July 2016
Acknowledgements
The International Phonetic Alphabet (2015) is reproduced by kind permission of
the International Phonetic Association.