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A phoneme is any set of similar speech sounds that is perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes, and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology.
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. 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:
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a nucleus with optional sounds before or after that nucleus. In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.
Autosegmental phonology is a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Igbo is the principal native language cluster of the Igbo people, an ethnicity in the Southeastern part of Nigeria.
Whistled languages are linguistic systems that use whistling as a form of speech and facilitate communication between individuals. More than 80 languages have been found to practice various degrees of whistling, most of them in rugged topography or dense forests, where whistling expands the area of communication while movement to carry messages is challenging. The practice is generally threatened by increased modernization and faster roads, but successful conservation efforts are recorded.
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
Meeussen's rule is a special case of tone reduction. It was first described in Bantu languages, but occurs in analyses of other languages as well, such as Papuan languages. The tonal alternation that it describes is the lowering, in some contexts, of the last tone of a pattern of two adjacent high tones (HH), resulting in the pattern HL. The phenomenon is named after its first observer, the Belgian Bantu specialist A. E. Meeussen (1912–1978). In phonological terms, the phenomenon can be seen as a special case of the obligatory contour principle.
The obligatory contour principle is a hypothesis in autosegmental phonology that states that (certain) consecutive identical features are banned in underlying representations. The OCP is most frequently cited when discussing the tones of tonal languages, but it has also been applied to other aspects of phonology. The principle is part of the larger notion of horror aequi, that language users generally avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures.
A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains neither consonants nor vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes.
The sonority sequencing principle (SSP) or sonority sequencing constraint is a phonotactic principle that aims to explain or predict the structure of a syllable in terms of sonority.
Flapping or tapping, also known as alveolar flapping, intervocalic flapping, or t-voicing, is a phonological process involving a voiced alveolar tap or flap; it is found in many varieties of English, especially North American, Cardiff, Ulster, Australian and New Zealand English, where the voiceless alveolar stop consonant phoneme is pronounced as a voiced alveolar flap, a sound produced by briefly tapping the alveolar ridge with the tongue, when placed between vowels. In London English, the flapped is perceived as a casual pronunciation intermediate between the affricate, with higher class associations, and the glottal stop, with lower class associations. In some varieties,, the voiced counterpart of, may also be frequently pronounced as a flap in such positions, making pairs of words like latter and ladder sound similar or identical. In similar positions, the combination may be pronounced as a nasalized flap, making winter sound similar or identical to winner.
Ignatius G. Mattingly (1927–2004) was a prominent American linguist and speech scientist. Prior to his academic career, he was an analyst for the National Security Agency from 1955 to 1966. He was a Lecturer and then Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut from 1966 to 1996 and a researcher at Haskins Laboratories from 1966 until his death in 2004. He is best known for his pioneering work on speech synthesis and reading and for his theoretical work on the motor theory of speech perception in conjunction with Alvin Liberman. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University in 1947, his M.A. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1959, and his Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1968.
Junko Itō is a Japanese-born American linguist. She is emerita research professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Feature geometry is a phonological theory which represents distinctive features as a structured hierarchy rather than a matrix or a set. Feature geometry grew out of autosegmental phonology, which emphasizes the autonomous nature of distinctive features and the non-uniform relationships among them. Feature geometry recognizes that some sets of features often pattern together in phonological and phonotactic generalizations, while others rarely interact. Feature geometry thus formally encodes groups of features under nodes in a tree: features that commonly pattern together are said to share a parent node, and operations on this set can be encoded as operation on the parent node.
Elisabeth O. Selkirk is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Donca Steriade is a Romanian-American professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory.
Annie Rialland is a French linguist who is Director of Research emerita of the CNRS Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (Paris). Her main domains of expertise are phonetics, phonology, prosody, and African languages.
Laura J. Downing is an American linguist, specializing in the phonology of African languages.
References
- ↑ Hyman, Larry. "Phonologist, Africanist, Typologist" (PDF). UC-Berkeley.
- ↑ "Nick Clements Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.se. Retrieved 2018-06-22.
- ↑ "Remembering G. Nick Clements". lpp.in2p3.fr. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2018-06-22.
- ↑ Elizabeth Hume, 2009-08-31, Obituary on LINGUIST list. Retrieved 2009-10-01.
