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Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones 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 may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds, typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "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.
A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch rather than by loudness or length, as in some other languages like English. Pitch-accent languages also contrast with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Standard Chinese, in which practically every syllable can have an independent tone. Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.
Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech.
In linguistics, focus is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.
Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress). Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced". Various phonological analyses exist for these phenomena.
In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.
The phonology of Japanese features a phonemic inventory of five vowels and 15 or more consonants. The phonotactics are relatively simple, allowing for few consonant clusters. Japanese phonology has been affected by the presence of several layers of vocabulary in the language: in addition to native Japanese vocabulary, Japanese has a large amount of Chinese-based vocabulary and loanwords from other languages.
In linguistics, a segment is "any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech". The term is most used in phonetics and phonology to refer to the smallest elements in a language, and this usage can be synonymous with the term phone.
This article describes the phonology of the Somali language.
In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words or to mark grammatical features.
The phonological word or prosodic word is a constituent in the phonological hierarchy. It is higher than the syllable and the foot but lower than intonational phrase and the phonological phrase. It is largely held to be a prosodic domain in which phonological features within the same lexeme may spread from one morph to another, from one clitic to a clitic host, or from one clitic host to a clitic.
In linguistics, a prosodic unit is a segment of speech that occurs with specific prosodic properties. These properties can be those of stress, intonation, or tonal patterns.
Metrical phonology is a theory of stress or linguistic prominence. The innovative feature of this theory is that the prominence of a unit is defined relative to other units in the same phrase. For example, in the most common pronunciation of the phrase "doctors use penicillin", the syllable '-ci-' is the strongest or most stressed syllable in the phrase, but the syllable 'doc-' is more stressed than the syllable '-tors'. Previously, generative phonologists and the American Structuralists represented prosodic prominence as a feature that applied to individual phonemes (segments) or syllables. This feature could take on multiple values to indicate various levels of stress. Stress was assigned using the cyclic reapplication of rules to words and phrases.
ToBI is a set of conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech. The term "ToBI" is sometimes used to refer to the conventions used for describing American English specifically, which was the first ToBI system, developed by Mary Beckman and Janet Pierrehumbert, among others. Other ToBI systems have been defined for a number of languages; for example, J-ToBI refers to the ToBI conventions for Tokyo Japanese, and an adaptation of ToBI to describe Dutch intonation was developed by Carlos Gussenhoven, and called ToDI. Another variation of ToBI, called IViE, was established in 1998 to enable comparison between several dialects of British English.
Speech tempo is a measure of the number of speech units of a given type produced within a given amount of time. Speech tempo is believed to vary within the speech of one person according to contextual and emotional factors, between speakers and also between different languages and dialects. However, there are many problems involved in investigating this variance scientifically.
In syntax, verb-initial (V1) word order is a word order in which the verb appears before the subject and the object. In the more narrow sense, this term is used specifically to describe the word order of V1 languages. V1 clauses only occur in V1 languages and other languages with a dominant V1 order displaying other properties that correlate with verb-initiality and that are crucial to many analyses of V1. V1 languages are estimated to make up 12–19% of the world’s languages.
Prosodic bootstrapping in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that learners of a primary language (L1) use prosodic features such as pitch, tempo, rhythm, amplitude, and other auditory aspects from the speech signal as a cue to identify other properties of grammar, such as syntactic structure. Acoustically signaled prosodic units in the stream of speech may provide critical perceptual cues by which infants initially discover syntactic phrases in their language. Although these features by themselves are not enough to help infants learn the entire syntax of their native language, they provide various cues about different grammatical properties of the language, such as identifying the ordering of heads and complements in the language using stress prominence, indicating the location of phrase boundaries, and word boundaries. It is argued that prosody of a language plays an initial role in the acquisition of the first language helping children to uncover the syntax of the language, mainly due to the fact that children are sensitive to prosodic cues at a very young age.
Marina Nespor is a Professor of linguistics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, and senior researcher in the ERC PASCAL Project, a project investigating language acquisition and the nature of the biological endowment that allows humans to learn language. Much of Dr. Nespor's research focuses on the interaction of phonology and syntax: what the prosodic structure of an utterance communicates about its grammatical structure.
Irene B. Vogel is an American linguist, specializing in phonology. She is a professor in the University of Delaware Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department, best known for her work on the phonology-syntax interface.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Selkirk, E. O. (1996). Martin, J.; Demuth, K. (eds.). "The prosodic structure of function words". International Conference on Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Hayes, Bruce (1989). Kiparsky, P.; Youmans, G. (eds.). "The prosodic hierarchy in meter". Phonetics and Phonology Vol. 1: Rhythm and Meter. San Diego: Academic Press: 201–260.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Nespor, M.; Vogel, I. (1986). Prosodic Phonology. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
- ↑ Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stephanie; Turk, Alice (1996). "A Prosody Tutorial for Investigators of Auditory Sentence Processing". Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 25 (2): 193–247. doi:10.1007/BF01708572. PMID 8667297. S2CID 31515990.
- 1 2 3 Pierrehumbert, J.; Beckman, M. B. (1988). Japanese Tone Structure . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
