PHONOLOGY
DEFINITION OF PHONOLOGY
Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic
organization of sounds in languages. It has traditionally focused largely on the study of the systems of phonemes in particular languages (and therefore used to be also
called phonemics, or phonematics), but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a
level beneath the word (including syllable, onset and rime, articulatory gestures,
articulatory features, mora, etc.) or
at all levels of language where sound is considered to be structured for conveying linguistic meaning. Phonology
also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages.
Phonology is often distinguished
from phonetics. While
phonetics concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech,phonology describes the way sounds
function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning.
DEVELOPMENT OF PHONOLOGY
In 1976 John
Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological
phenomena are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of
segments, called phonemes or feature combinations, but rather as involving some
parallel sequences of features which reside on multiple tiers.
Autosegmental phonology later evolved into feature geometry, which became the standard theory
of representation for theories of the organization of phonology as different as
lexical phonology and optimality 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 of principles and vary according to their
selection of certain binary parameters. 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, though parameters may sometimes come into conflict.
Prominent figures in this field include Jonathan Kaye, Jean
Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette, and John Harris.
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 as phonemes. For example, in English, the
"p" sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced
[pʰ]) while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced [p]). However,
English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones) of the same phonological category,
that is of the phoneme /p/.
Part of the phonological study of a
language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the
speech of native 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.
In addition to the minimal units
that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds
alternate, i.e. replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs), as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress, feature geometry, accent, and intonation.
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