Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics) is the branch of linguistics that concerns how languages organize the foundational elements that make their words. In spoken languages, these are phonemes like vowel and consonant sounds that affect meaning. Examples of this effect can be found in comparisons of English words like bat and gnat. In sign languages, these are components of signs such as hand shape and location. Examples can be found in comparisons of American Sign Language signs glossed as CAR and WHICH (hand shape contrasts) and APPLE and ONION (location contrasts). At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either:

Terminology

The word "phonology" (as in "phonology of English") can refer either to the field of study or to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems that a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax, its morphology and its lexicon. The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek , phōnḗ, 'voice, sound', and the suffix -logy (which is from Greek , lógos, 'word, speech, subject of discussion').

Phonology is typically distinguished from phonetics, which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds or signs of language. More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, and in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behavior and organization of sounds as linguistic items."

The study of phonology as it exists today is defined by the formative studies of the 19th-century Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, who (together with his students Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba in the Kazan School) shaped the modern usage of the term phoneme in a series of lectures<!--A detailed programme of lectures for the academic year, p. 115--> in 1876–1877. The word phoneme had been coined a few years earlier, in 1873, by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes. In a paper read at 24 May meeting of the Société de Linguistique de Paris, Dufriche-Desgenettes proposed for phoneme to serve as a one-word equivalent for the German Sprachlaut. Baudouin de Courtenay's subsequent 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 may have had an influence on the work of Saussure, according to E. F. K. Koerner.

thumb|right|upright=0.75|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),

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 ) while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced ). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones, which cannot give origin to minimal pairs) of the same phonological category, that is of the phoneme . (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated were interchanged with the unaspirated in spot, native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same" .) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes. For example, in Thai, Bengali, 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).

thumb|upright=1.15|The vowels of modern (Standard) [[Arabic (left) and (Israeli) Hebrew (right) 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.]]

thumb|upright=1.15|The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonetic point of view. 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, and , 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.<!-- This is not correct, morphophonemes were present already in the Prague School and are by no means an invention of generative phonology. "Underlying segments" should be referred to instead. If the author does not chage it, I will edit it later. -->

Other topics

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In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, or replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs), as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress, feature geometry, tone, 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 that can be feeding or bleeding,) 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 sublexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds.

See also

  • Absolute neutralisation
  • Cherology
  • List of phonologists
  • Second language phonology

Notes

References

Bibliography

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