Descriptive Phonology

  • Phonetics is messy - you never say the exact same articulation twice. low-level variants
    • mentally, there is a target articulation, but you don’t always reach it (time, etc.)
  • Categorical perception of phonetic variation is evidence for mental abstraction of sounds (phonology)
    • all low level variants will be perceived as one sound as long as it’s in the target cluster
  • the target clusters suggest a series of mental calculations or planning units
  • Phonology: study of systematic nature of sounds as mental categories
    • Descriptive: analysis of sound patterns and sound alterations
    • Cognitive: analysis of sound processing and productions
  • Sound patterns: mental knowledge of what phonemes occur in the language and what sequences of phonemes are allowed
    • Umlaut rules
    • man ➝ men
    • tooth ➝ teeth
    • Ablaut rules
    • sing ➝ sang ➝ sung
    • drive ➝ drove ➝ driven
  • Phonotactics: knowing what sequence of phonemes are allowed. (ex: no t before k)
  • Sound Alterations: rules governing range of low-level phonetic articulation
    • aspiration
    • velarization (light l and dark l)
    • deletion
    • british english drops the r
    • american english drops the t
  • Descriptive phonology examines sound patterns and alternations in a language through collected phonetic data
  • Phonology: Basic Inventories
    • phoneme inventories: each language makes use of a specific set of sounds to build syllables and words
  • Phonotactics: speech sounds have a distribution
    • not all sounds can appear in all positions in a word or combine into syllables the same way
    • not all sound can appear next to one another in sequence
  • Phonotactic Constraints: rules for one language can’t be mapped onto another
    • why bilingual people have trouble sometimes
    • clusters from another language get reduced and altered to fit the rules of the native language
    • that’s how you get accents - phonotactics of the source language don’t overlap with those of the target language
    • many-to-one mapping