LNGS 401 Lecture Notes 1, 2 - 2024 - PDF

LNGS 401 Lecture Notes 1, 2 November 05, 2024 Dr. Fusheini Hudu General intro: Today’s lecture is going to cover the following: What the course is about. We shall go through the course outline, which will give you the understanding that this c...

LNGS 401 Lecture Notes 1, 2 November 05, 2024 Dr. Fusheini Hudu General intro: Today’s lecture is going to cover the following: What the course is about. We shall go through the course outline, which will give you the understanding that this course is a continuation of what you learned last year in LNGS301. After going through the course outline, we shall do a brief review/overview of what phonology is about. The goal is to refresh your mind and get you ready for the main content of this course. What is phonology? There are three basic issues we investigate in phonology. i. Regularities that define the units of phonology in a language. ii. Patterns of distribution. iii. Alternations (morphemes) In this course, our interest is in crosslinguistic patterns/generalisations relating all three basic issues. We will then see how these patterns and generalisations are analysed using various theories. In phonological analyses, there is a focus on various units for the purpose of unearthing phonological patterns and generalisations. What are the units of phonology? There are units of grammar that constitute the core units of phonology. From the most basic upwards, these core units are features, sounds, syllables, stress, tone, and intonation. We studied the nature of each of these units in LNGS 301. Of these, syllables (and syllabic units such as the onset, nucleus, coda, rhyme, mora), stress, tone and intonation are part of a sub-filed of phonology called prosody. They are prosodic units. Prosodic units share one feature: they transcend the boundaries of individual segments. Either they consist of more than one segment put together (e.g. the syllable) or they are associated with more than one segment (e.g. stress, tone, intonation). Another name for stress, tone and intonation is suprasegmental features. In dealing with these core units of phonology for phonological analysis, we have to look into morphological units like morphemes and words, and syntactic units like phrases and sentences. In today’s class, we shall briefly go over what we said last year about segments (vowels and consonants) in language. What is phonology: The basics in brief (Note: This is a brief recap of what we did last year. Read your detailed LNGS301 notes to refresh your memory). In the course on introduction to phonology, you learned that in phonology, we study: o Sounds as mental objects in specific languages o Sounds as they are organised in the mind o The distribution of sounds in words o The sequencing or patterning of sounds with other sounds to form words and phrases. o The changes that sounds undergo and the principles behind these changes. You also learned that in doing these basic analyses, meaning is the independent Dr. F. Hudu. LNGS 401 Lecture Notes (Lecture 1: November 05, 2024) page 1 of 7  arbiter. We resort to meaning to determine if a sound exists in a language. After establishing that certain sounds exist in a language, we also need meaning to determine if two or more existing sounds are separate distinct sounds (phonemes) or different realisations of one and the same sound (allophones of one phonemes). We noted that: If the presence versus absence of a sound in a word can change the meaning of a word, that sound is part of the phonology of the language and is distinctive (e.g. [spik] versus [pik]). Thus, [s] is a phoneme (mental sound) in English. If by replacing one sound with other sounds the meaning of the word changes, the sounds being replaced are different phonological sounds (phonemes) (e.g. [taim] versus [daim] and [laim]). Thus, [t], [d], [l] are separate phonemes (mental sounds) in English. If by replacing one sound in a word with another or others, the meaning of the word remains the same, then the two sounds are not separate phonological sounds, though they are different phonetic sounds. The two or more sounds are one phoneme that changes in different contexts (e.g. [bɛtə] and [bɛɾə]). Both words have the same meaning:. Thus, [t] and [ɾ] are not different phonemes in English. It is one and the same mental sound that is either realised as [t] or [ɾ] in North American English. Notice that phonetically, [t] and [ɾ] are different sounds because they are different phonetic features. But phonologically they are not different because replacing one of them with the other in a word does not cause a meaning change. You also learned how to write rules to account for the occurrence or distribution of sounds in different contexts. If we had plenty of American English words with [t] and [ɾ], and studied the local environments of these sounds, we would realise that each occurs in a different environment. Let us illustrate rule writing using something we observe everyday. When you are thirsty, you need a liquid called “water”, to quench your thirst. When you keep a bottle containing the same water you drank into a deep freezer overnight, the water will become solid, and will be called “ice” and can no more be drank, even though it is the same content that you drank the night before. If you pour the water into a pan and place it on a burning stove, after a while, the water will change into vapour and vanish into the air. The rising vapour, solid ice, and liquid water are all originally one and the same thing. The only reason we see them in different states is the temperature it finds itself in. In a freezing temperature, it becomes solid, in a very high temperature it becomes gas, and in a normal (room) temperature, it is liquid. If I ask you which of these three states is the normal state, you will most likely say it is the liquid state. So, you could write a rule like the following to account for the different realisations of the water. [ice (solid)] / in a very low temperature /water/ [vapour (gas)] / in a very high temperature [water (liquid)] / elsewhere In level 300, we studied similar phonological rules about sounds that are not separate phonemes, using information about their distribution. We noted that when two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme, they will not be seen in the same environment. In our current example, you will realise that water, ice and vapour cannot be found in the same temperature. Where you see one, you will not see the othersother. Dr. F. Hudu. LNGS 401 Lecture Notes (Lecture 1: November 05, 2024) page 2 of 7  You also learned that in writing the rule, we determine what the default realisation of the phoneme is by looking at which of them occurs in many/wider environments. In other words, which of the realisations do we see most of the time. We used the same criterion to choose the liquid state as the default, because that is what we see most of the time. If you were to ask a chemist who knows the chemical components of water to write this rule, they will most likely represent the various states differently, using their chemical properties. Instead of “water”, you would get H2O. This is similar to writing a rule using the features of the sounds, instead of the segments themselves. In our next lecture, we shall be looking at features and the two major kinds of features we have in phonology. Dr. F. Hudu. LNGS 401 Lecture Notes (Lecture 1: November 05, 2024) page 3 of 7