Graduate-level phonology
Instructor: Darin Flynn
Course prerequisites: LING 303 & 403, or equivalent
Class time, location: Mondays 2-4:50pm, SS 836
Office hours: Wednesdays 2-3pm, SS 806
Telephone: Department: 220-5469; Darin: 220-6110
E-mail: dflynn at-sign ucalgary dot ca (feel free to email questions)
Assignment of grades: Course grades will be assigned on a distribution that is NOT more restrictive than the one below:
A+ 97-100% B+ 84-88% C+ 69-73% D+ 54-58%
A 93-96% B 79-83% C 64-68% D 50-53%
A- 89-92% B- 74-78% C- 59-63% F 0-49%
Grading system:
4 class presentations of readings (see schedule below) @ 5% each
Class participation 5%
Research prospectus (due November 7) 5%
2 problem sets (due October 24 & November 28) @ 5% each
Book review presentation (November 14) 5%
Book review (due November 21) 20%
Final research presentation (December 5) 5%
Major section of a joint research paper (due December 15) 30%
Re: presentations: I’ve assigned a couple of articles/chapters to each class. Look in the schedule below to see which ones you are presenting. Give yourself at least a few days to prepare for your presentation, which should be supported by handouts or overhead-projections or computer-projected slides.
Re: problem sets: These two sets of exercises will be handed out at least ten days in advance and will be due October 24 and November 28, respectively.
Re: class participation: Even days on which you are not presenting, it is important that you not only attend class, but also be an active participant in class discussions by contributing your thoughts, information, or questions. Feel free to make such contributions at any time, as I will not judge you on them —unless they make it obvious that you have not read the assigned readings.
Re: book review: In our very first week, you must choose a new book (2009 or later) on a topic that intersects with the course content and your own personal interests. In the end, your review should be about 8 pages long. It should assess the book’s content, merit and style. The goal is to develop critical and analytical skills, so feel free to add some of your own ideas or relevant data. In the first two months I will ask you repeatedly about your review, and also ask that you come discuss your progress with me during office hours. On November 14, you will give a class presentation on your review (20 min. max.). The feedback you receive following this presentation should inform the final version, which is due November 21.
Re: research paper: Because we have a small yet diverse class, I would like you to write a joint paper together, on a topic of general interest, chosen together in class. Each of you will be responsible for one aspect that suits your interests and strengths.
Over the next month, we will need to investigate possible research topics and choose one together in the first half of October.[1] By November 7 at the latest, turn in a brief prospectus (no more than one page) in which you describe the subtopic you are investigating, cite the main source(s) you are consulting, and suggest why it’s interesting or where your investigations might lead. I expect your written portion of the group project to be in the range of 15-20 pages. On December 5, you will present your research in class. For this presentation you should prepare a brief handout setting out the data and the main analytic or theoretical points. The written version of your report is due December 15.
All written work must be submitted electronically (preferably pdf or Word document). All phonetic characters must be typed in a well-known phonetic font. On PCs you’ll find all phonetic characters in Lucida Sans Unicode (or else in Arial Unicode MS, which is normally installed with Word XP). Word 2007 is installed with fonts that have ALL phonetic symbols (Times New Roman, Arial, etc.). Another good font on PCs for phonetic symbols is Segoe UI. Windows' new default fonts, Calibri and Cambria, as included in Windows 7, are also IPA-compliant. OS 10.2.3 and higher has a Unicode font called Lucida Sans Regular which includes IPA. Locate LucidaSansRegular.ttf and drag it to the Library folder of your user Home directory.
Course content: This readings- and problems-based course focuses on phonology —both segmental and prosodic— from a generative perspective (Chomsky 1951, Halle 1962, 1964, Chomsky 1964, Chomsky & Halle 1968, for a history, see e.g. Kenstowicz 2006, Goldsmith & Laks 2011). This view of phonology —as the study of an aspect of human cognition rather than the study of an external, physical or social reality— was pioneered by Edward Sapir, a Mozart-like figure in linguistics during the first half of the twentieth century. As Chomsky (1965:193) describes, “Sapir’s mentalistic phonology ... used informant responses and comments as evidence bearing on the psychological reality of some abstract system of phonological elements.” Aside from Sapir (1933[1949]), which is especially famous, you should also read Sapir (1925). This classic, which appeared in the first volume of Language, clarifies that sound can be studied from the point of view of physics, sociophonetics or cognitive science, and emphasizes “the necessity of getting behind the sense data of any type of expression in order to grasp the intuitively felt and communicated forms which alone give significance to such expression” (p. 51).
In our course we will pay special attention to the relationship with phonetics (Keating 1990, 1996). A key point of discussion will be the generative assumptions (i) that the phonological and phonetic components of grammar are separate modules and (ii) that the former deals in discrete categories, the latter in continuous gradients. These assumptions are seen in the following three excerpts from recent literature:
We take the essential difference between phonetics and phonology to be in the character of the objects studied: phonetics studies objects in continuous three-dimensional space, frequency domain, and time, whereas phonology studies symbolic representations employing a largely discrete alphabet, whose global structure can be represented as a relatively simple graph. (Goldsmith & Laks 2011:16)
Categorical phonology and gradient phonetics are privileged due to the central task of the phonology in the maintenance and realization of contrast and the fundamentally continuous nature of the physical realization of sound patterns. (Cohn 2007:25)
We will examine sound patterns —distributions and alternations— as phonetic and/or phonological. The clearest cases will be those involving objects that are either strictly phonetic (e.g., stop release: Anderson 1974) or strictly phonological (e.g., the syllable: Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979:255-6). More controversy surrounds those properties which are considered either phonetic or phonological, depending on the language —or the analyst. For instance, many cases of allophony presented in phonology textbooks such as Jensen (2004) and Hayes (2009) are analyzed as phonetic processes by others (e.g., Keyser & Stevens 2006). On the other hand, the incomplete neutralization of voicing in German (Port & Leary 2005) and the near-merger of tones in Cantonese (Yu 2007) and of neutral vowels in Hungarian (Benus & Gafos 2007), which are each alleged to stump formal phonology, can perhaps be treated simply with autosegmental [+voice] (Oostendorp 2008), [+upper register] (Yip 2002) and [+back] (Ringen & Vago 1998:399), respectively. Of particular interest are what Cohn (2007:7) calls “phonetic and phonological doublets, cases where there are parallel categorical and gradient effects in the same language, with independent evidence suggesting that the former are due to the phonology and the latter result from the implementation of the former.” Two good examples we will consider are nasalization and palatalization in English vs. French (Cohn 1993) and Russian (Zsiga 2000). We will also look at how “enhancing” patterns can be understood in the phonetics as addition and substitution of properties in the phonetics (Keyser & Stevens 2006, Howe & Fulop 2005).
Of course, our survey will not be exhaustive. In segmental phonology we will concentrate only on voicing, nasality, and palatalization. Our survey of prosodic phonology will be more exhaustive; only the highest levels of the intonation phrase and utterance will be ignored.
Course schedule:
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Date |
Topics & readings |
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9/12 |
In the beginning was ... |
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9/19 |
From phonetics to phonology, and back... |
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9/26 |
Assimilation: phonetics or phonology?
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10/3 |
Assimilation in Optimality Theory |
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10/12 |
Harmony: spreading or agreement? |
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10/24 |
Moras and syllables
N.B.: Assignment #1 due by midnight, by email: provide an OT analysis of consonant agreement in Kinyarwanda based on the description in Walker et al. (2008) [pdf] |
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10/31 |
Syllables ctd.
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11/7 |
Stress
N.B.: Research prospectus due by midnight, by email |
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11/14 |
Words
Student presentations on book reviews 20 min. each |
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11/21 |
Phrases
N.B.: Book reviews (revised from 11/14 feedback) due by midnight |
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11/28 |
Sentences
N.B.: Problem set #2 due by midnight, by email |
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12/5 |
Student presentations on joint final research paper: max. 30 min. each |
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12/15 |
Due by midnight, by email please |
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References:
Ajíbóyè, Oládiípò, & Douglas Pulleyblank. 2008. Moba nasal harmony. Ms. University of Lagos & University of British Columbia.
Anderson, Stephen R. 1974. The organization of phonology. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Anttila, Arto, Matthew Adams, & Michael Speriosu. 2010. The role of prosody in the English dative alternation. Language and Cognitive Processes 25(7-9). 946-981.
Benus, Stefan, & Adamantios I. Gafos. 2007. Articulatory characteristics of Hungarian 'transparent' vowels. Journal of Phonetics 35(3). 271-300.
Broselow, Ellen. 2009. Stress adaptation in loanword phonology: perception and learnability. In Paul Boersma and Silke Hamann (eds.), Phonology in perception, 191-234. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.
Broselow, Ellen, Su-I Chen, & Marie Huffman. 1997. Syllable weight: Convergence of phonology and phonetics. Phonology 14(1). 47-82.
Chomsky, Noam. 1951. Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania MA thesis.
Chomsky, Noam. 1964. Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton de Gruyter.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam, & Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Cohn, Abigail C. 1993. Nasalisation in English: Phonology or phonetics. Phonology 10(1). 43-81.
Cohn, Abigail C. 2007. Phonetics in phonology and phonology in phonetics. Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 16. 1-31.
Czaplicki, Bartłomiej. 2007. Syllable structure of Ukrainian: an OT perspective. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 43(2). 23-41.
Davis, Stuart, & Michael Hammond. 1995. On the status of onglides in American English. Phonology 12(2). 159-182.
de Lacy, Paul. 2009. Phonological evidence. In Steve Parker (ed.), Phonological argumentation: essays on evidence and motivation, vol., 43-78. London, UK: Equinox.
Dresher, B. Elan. 2011. The phoneme. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume and Keren Rice (eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology, vol. 1, 241-266. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Flynn, Darin. 2011. Foot recursion in English. Ms. University of Calgary.
Fudge, Erik C. 1990. Language as organised sound: phonology. In N. E. Collinge (ed.), An encyclopedia of language, vol., 30-67. London, UK: Routledge.
Goldsmith, John A., & Bernard Laks. 2011. Generative phonology: its origins, its principles, and its successors. In John E. Joseph and Linda R. Waugh (eds.), The Cambridge history of linguistics, vol. London, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, T. A. 2006. English syllabification as the interaction of markedness constraints. Studia Linguistica 60(1). 1-33.
Halle, Morris. 1962. Phonology in generative grammar. Word 18(1/2). 54-72.
Halle, Morris. 1964. On the bases of phonology. In Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz (eds.), The structure of language, vol., 604-612. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur. 2007. On the evolution of consonant harmony: the case of secondary articulation agreement. Phonology 24(1). 77-120.
Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur. 2010. Long-distance voicing assimilation in Berber: spreading and/or agreement? In Melinda Heijl (ed.), Actes du Congrès de l'ACL 2010 / 2010 CLA Conference Proceedings, vol.: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cla-acl/actes2010/actes2010.html.
Hayes, Bruce. 2009. Introductory phonology. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Howe, Darin [Flynn], & Sean Fulop. 2005. Acoustic features in Northern Athabaskan. Paper presented at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Oakland, CA, Conference Jan. 6-9, 2005.
Ito, Junko, & Armin Mester. 2003. Weak layering and word binarity. In Takeru Honma, Masao Okazaki, Toshiyuki Tabata and Shin-ichi Tanaka (eds.), A new century of phonology and phonological theory: a festschrift for professor Shōsuke Haraguchi on the ocasion of his sixtieth birthday, vol., 26-65. Tokyo, Japan: Kaitakusha.
Ito, Junko, & Armin Mester. 2009. The extended prosodic word. In Janet Grijzenhout and Barış Kabak (eds.), Phonological domains: universals and deviations, vol., 135-194. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ito, Junko, & Armin Mester. 2011. Recursive prosodic phrasing in Japanese. In Toni Borowsky, Shigeto Kawahara, Takahito Shinya and Mariko Sugahara (eds.), Prosody matters: essays in honor of Elisabeth Selkirk, vol. London, UK: Equinox.
Jensen, John T. 2004. Principles of generative phonology: an introduction. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Keating, Patricia A. 1990. Phonetic representations in a generative grammar. Journal of Phonetics 18. 321-334.
Keating, Patricia A. 1996. The phonology-phonetics interface. In Ursula Kleinhenz (ed.), Interfaces in phonology, vol., 262-278. Berlin, Germany: Akademie Verlag.
Kenstowicz, Michael, & Charles Kisseberth. 1979. Generative phonology: description and theory. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Kenstowicz, Michael, Mahasen Abu-Mansour, & Miklóz Törkenczy. 2003. Two notes on laryngeal licensing. In Stephan Ploch (ed.), Living on the Edge: 28 Papers in Honour of Jonathan Kaye, vol., 259-282. Berlin, Germany: Mouton De Gruyter.
Kenstowicz, Michael. 2006. Generative phonology. In Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, vol. 5, 1385-1396. Oxford, UK: Elsevier.
Keyser, Samuel J., & Kenneth N. Stevens. 2006. Enhancement and overlap in the speech chain. Language 82(1). 33-63.
Kiparsky, Paul. 2006. Syllables and moras in Arabic. In Caroline Féry and Ruben van de Vijver (eds.), The syllable in Optimality Theory, vol., 147-182. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lass, Roger. 1984. Phonology: an introduction to basic concepts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Nevins, Andrew, & Bert Vaux. 2004. Consonant harmony in Karaim. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 46. 175-194.
Oostendorp, Marc van. 2008. Incomplete devoicing in formal phonology. Lingua 118(9). 1362-1374.
Port, Robert F., & Adam P. Leary. 2005. Against formal phonology. Language 81(4). 927-964.
Poser, William J. 1990. Evidence for foot structure in Japanese. Language 66(1). 78-105.
Raffelsiefen, Renate. 2005. Paradigm uniformity effects versus boundary effects. In Laura J. Downing, T. A. Hall and Renate Raffelsiefen (eds.), Paradigms in phonological theory, vol., 211-262. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Ringen, Catherine O., & Robert M. Vago. 1998. Hungarian vowel harmony in Optimality Theory. Phonology 15(3). 393-416.
Rubach, Jerzy. 2005. Mid vowel fronting in Ukrainian. Phonology 22(1). 1-36.
Sapir, Edward. 1925. Sound patterns in language. Language 1(2). 37-51.
Sapir, Edward. 1933[1949]. The psychological reality of phonemes. In David Mandelbaum (ed.), Selected writings of Edward Sapir, vol., 46-60. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Smith, Jennifer L. 2011. The formal definition of the ONSET constraint and implications for Korean syllable structure. In Toni Borowsky, Shigeto Kawahara, Takahito Shinya and Mariko Sugahara (eds.), Prosody matters: essays in honor of Elisabeth Selkirk, vol. London, UK: Equinox.
Teliga, Viktoriia. 2011. Phonological movement in Ukrainian. Fresno, CA: California State University MA thesis.
Thurgood, Graham. 2002. Vietnamese and tonogenesis: Revising the model and the analysis. Diachronica 19(2). 333-363.
Walker, Rachel. 2000. Yaka nasal harmony: Spreading or segmental correspondence? Berkeley Linguistics Society 26. 321-332.
Wetzel, Linda. 2009. Types and tokens: on abstract objects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Yip, Moira. 2002. Tone. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Yu, Alan C. L. 2007. Understanding near mergers: the case of morphological tone in Cantonese Phonology 24(1). 187-214.
Zsiga, Elizabeth C. 2000. Phonetic alignment constraints: consonant overlap and palatalization in English and Russian. Journal of Phonetics 28. 69-102.
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[1] To give just one possible example: last term, while working with a lexicographer of Somali (who is now studying at the University of Calgary), I was intrigued by a rule of word-final voicing rule in his language. This alleged rule was the center of a three-way debate between Juliette Blevins, Paul de Lacy and Paul Kiparsky in a recent special issue of Theoretical Linguistics. More questions than solutions were raised in the debate, which relied on contradictory and mostly unpublished reports by third parties. It is clear that the controversy would benefit from a collaborative effort which addresses the relevant issues in terms of phonetics, phonology, sound change, acquisition, etc.
[2] Keating (among others) addresses the common misconception (e.g., Fudge 1990:30) that “phonetics, unlike phonology, is independent of particular languages” (Wetzel 2009:8).
[3] “Everyone knows that ‘a syllable is what syllable has three of’” (Lass 1984:248), yet “there is no agreed phonetic definition of the syllable” (Ladefoged 1982:218).