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.
All about word
The word phonology (as in the phonology of
English) can also
refer to the phonological system (sound system) of a given language. This is
one of the fundamental systems which a language is considered to comprise, like
its syntax and its vocabulary.
Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics. While phonetics concerns the
physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech,[1][2] phonology describes the way sounds
function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For
many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics, and phonology to theoretical linguistics, although establishing the phonological system of a language is
necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic
evidence. Note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before
the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century. Some
subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive
disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception, resulting in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology.
Derivation and definitions
The word phonology comes from the Greek
φωνή, phōnḗ, "voice, sound," and the suffix -logy (which
is from Greek λόγος, lógos, "word, speech, subject of
discussion"). Definitions of the term vary. Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Grundzüge der
Phonologie (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining
to the system of language," as opposed to phonetics, which is "the
study of sound pertaining to the act of speech" (the distinction between language
and speech being basically Saussure's distinction between langue
and parole).[3]
More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to the
subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, while in
more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function,
behavior and organization of sounds as linguistic items."[1]
According to Clark et al. (2007), it means the systematic use of sound to encode
meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying
this use.[4]
Development of phonology
The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, the Sanskrit grammar composed by Pāṇini in the
4th century BC. In particular the Shiva Sutras, an auxiliary text to the Ashtadhyayi,
introduces what can be considered a list of the phonemes of the Sanskrit language,
with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which
deals with matters of morphology, syntax and semantics.
The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (together with his former student Mikołaj Kruszewski) introduced the concept of the phoneme in 1876, and his work, though often
unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He
also worked on the theory of phonetic alternations (what is now called allophony and morphophonology), and had a significant influence
on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Nikolai
Trubetzkoy, 1920s
An influential school of phonology in the interwar
period was the Prague school. One of its
leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology),[3] published posthumously in 1939, is
among the most important works in the field from this period. Directly
influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, although this concept had also
been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the
Prague school was Roman Jakobson, who was
one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century.
In 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. These features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features
describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed
set, and have the binary values + or −. There are at least two levels of
representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic
representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual
pronunciation (the so-called surface form). An important consequence of the
influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable
and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved
and created problems.
Natural phonology is a theory based on the
publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and (more explicitly) in
1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes that interact with one another; which ones are active and which are
suppressed is language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological
processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a
syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are
unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously (though the
output of one process may be the input to another). The second most prominent
natural phonologist is Patricia Donegan (Stampe's wife); there are many natural
phonologists in Europe, and a few in the U.S., such as Geoffrey Nathan. The
principles of natural phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded natural morphology.
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.
In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed optimality theory—an overall architecture for
phonology according to which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that
best satisfies a list of constraints ordered by importance; a lower-ranked
constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a
higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, and has become a dominant trend in
phonology. The appeal to phonetic grounding of constraints and representational
elements (e.g. features) in various approaches has been criticized by
proponents of 'substance-free phonology', especially Mark Hale and Charles Reiss.[5][6]
Broadly speaking, government phonology (or its
descendant, strict-CV phonology) has a greater following in the United Kingdom,
whereas optimality theory is
predominant in the United States.[citation needed]
An integrated approach to phonological theory that
combines synchronic and diachronic accounts to sound patterns was initiated
with Evolutionary Phonology in recent years.[7]
Analysis of phonemes
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/. (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an
aspirated [pʰ] were interchanged with the unaspirated [p] in spot,
native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two
sounds are perceived as "the same" /p/.) In some other languages,
however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently
assigned to different phonemes. For example, in Thai, Hindi, and Quechua, there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration is
the only contrasting feature (two words can have different meanings but with
the only difference in pronunciation being that one has an aspirated sound
where the other has an unaspirated one).
The vowels
of modern (Standard) Arabic and
(Israeli) Hebrew from the phonemic point of view.
Note the intersection of the two circles—the distinction between short a,
i and u is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid
articulation of short vowels, while Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel
length.
The vowels
of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonetic point of
view. Note that the two circles are totally separate—none of the vowel-sounds
made by speakers of one language is made by speakers of the other.
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.
The particular contrasts which are phonemic in a
language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v], two sounds that have
the same place and manner of articulation and differ in voicing only, were
allophones of the same phoneme in English, but later came to belong to separate
phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as
described in historical linguistics.
The findings and insights of speech perception and
articulation research complicate the traditional and somewhat intuitive idea of
interchangeable allophones being perceived
as the same phoneme. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can
result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is
highly co-articulated, so it is problematic to expect to be able to splice
words into simple segments without affecting speech perception.
Different linguists therefore take different
approaches to the problem of assigning sounds to phonemes. For example, they
differ in the extent to which they require allophones to be phonetically
similar. There are also differing ideas as to whether this grouping of sounds
is purely a tool for linguistic analysis, or reflects an actual process in the
way the human brain processes a language.
Since the early 1960s, theoretical linguists have
moved away from the traditional concept of a phoneme, preferring to consider
basic units at a more abstract level, as a component of morphemes; these units can be called morphophonemes,
and analysis using this approach is called morphophonology.
Other topics in phonology
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.
Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on
what sounds can appear in what positions in a given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound
changes through the application of phonological rules, sometimes in a given order which
can be feeding or bleeding,[8]) as well as prosody, the study
of suprasegmentals and topics
such as stress and intonation.
The principles of phonological analysis can be
applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general
analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been
applied to the analysis of sign languages (see Phonemes in sign languages), even though the sub-lexical units are not instantiated as speech
soundshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar