Introduction to Linguistics 2: Winter 2008

John Goldsmith Office: Classics 307

Office hours Monday 2-3:00, and I'm available a lot of the time otherwise -- just call or email.

goldsmith@uchicago.edu

My webpage

Teaching assistant: Jacqueline Bunting

Discussion section

IPA fonts: click here Or google on "IPA fonts SIL download". What you must do for this course: download and install two fonts: DoulosSIL and Gentium. Please note that DoulosSIL is not the same as SILDoulos (go figure...). For detailed information about how to type with phonetic fonts, see an excellent page prepared by Bruce Hayes on this subject. I have copied the most important part of it at the bottom of this page.

Goal of the course

We will cover this quarter some of the basic ideas involved in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and look at American Sign Language, the language of the Deaf in the United States.

Here's what I hope you'll take away from this course:

First, you will learn to really listen to the sounds of your own language with a language-independent ear. You'll listen to other languages in the same way, too. And this holds for the vowels, the consonants, and the intonation.

Second, you'll understand what a phoneme is: you'll understand the basic idea, and you'll understand something about how the notion can be defined and applied in a precise fashion.

Third, you'll understand a bit about what a word is in English, and in what respects words can be decomposed into component parts, and in what ways new words arise.

Fourth, you'll learn some basic facts about American Sign Language: how the visual-gestural mode of communication is similar to and different from the oral-aural mode, how the language arose historically, and how it is structured in ways parallel to the structuring of spoken language.

Grading policy

The grade is based on these things: homework problems (60%) a midterm on February 9 (15%) a final during finals week (25%)

In reality, class participation can't help but be relevant, too. (Don't believe anyone who says it isn't.)

Your work outside the class consists of two parts: the homework problem sets and the reading. Your homework can be graded directly. The time you spend in reading and thinking about the assigned reading will be evaluated in the midterm and final. A large part of the midterm and the final will consist of questions involving the assigned reading.

Grading scale: 10: Unbelievably good job: no way could we expect a student to turn in an assignment like this. Rarely do we give this grade. 9: Excellent: exactly what we hoped for. 8: Fine; not perfect, but the most important things were correctly accounted for. 7: Good enough, but some important things were missed, or done wrongly. 6: Not good enough. 5: And it goes down from there.

For detailed information about how to type with phonetic fonts:

See an excellent page prepared by Bruce Hayes on this subject. I have copied the most important part of it at the bottom of this page.

 

Overview

Week number Tuesday Thursday

Overview of the course

Introduction to phonetics: how speech sounds are made by humans: source/filter model; articulatory apparatus. Just a bit about acoustic phonetics.

The sounds of English

...and what we need to describe them.

Sounds of French & Spanish

Major classes: vowels and consonants; sonorants, obstruents, sonority hierarchy.

The phoneme

More complex phonemic examples

The syllable

and also rule ordering.

Yokuts: abstract vowels

A case study of complex distribution: the flap in American English

Complex tonal system: Bantu

English intonation
7 February 19 & 21

History of all of linguistics

Midterm
8 February 26 & 28

Morphology 1

Blind morphological analysis
9 March 4 & 6

Morphology 2

ASL 1
10 March 11 & 13

ASL 2

 Optional class today

Automatic morphological analysis

 

Readings and assignments

Week number Assignment based on this week's work Reading for this week. All of this is available on the Chalk site.
1 i. O'Grady et al: Exercises 2-7, 9, 10 on pp. 52ff:.

January 3:

O'Grady et al.: Pp 15-37; 42; 44-49

2

i. O'Grady et al: Exercises 3, 4, 5,

ii. Kongo obstruents

January 10:

(Optional) Edward Sapir: Sound patterns in language. Language 1 37-51. 1925.

(Optional) Morris Swadesh. The phonemic principle. Language 10 117-129. 1934.

O'Grady et al: Pp. 57-83. Appendix: Hints for solving phonology problems, pp. 99-101.On features: pp. 108-109.
3

 

i. Isthmus Zapotec

ii. Tonkawa

January 17:

Abigail Cohn: Phonology. Chapter 8 in The Handbook of Linguistics, ed. by Aronoff and Rees-Miller.

(Optional) Leonard Bloomfield: The stressed vowels of American English. Language 11(2) 97-116. 1935.

4

i. Lamba

ii. Navajo

iii. Palauan

 

January 24:

Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, Generative Phonology: Section on Yokuts.

How do Americans flap their /t/s?

 
5 No assignment: study for midterm!

January 31: Complex tonal system and English intonation

Reading from Week 1, Section 8, on prosody.

John Goldsmith: English as a tone language.
6 Midterm week i. Okpe vowel system: for weekend after the midterm.

Feb. 7:

Current phonological models

John Goldsmith: Aims of autosegmental phonology.

If you want to read more about the history of phonology, you can go to this website.
7 i. Indonesian prefixes.

February 14:

John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks: On the origins, principles, and successors to generative phonology.

Andrew Spencer: Morphology. Chapter 9 in The Handbook of Linguistics, ed. by Aronoff and Rees-Miller.
8 i. Blind morphology problem, part 1

February 21

9 i. Second part of blind problem.

February 28 : ASL linguistics

Wendy Sandler and Diane Lillo-Martin: Natural Sign Languages. Chapter 22 in The Handbook of Linguistics, ed. by Aronoff and Rees-Miller.
10   March 8:

 

In more detail:

Week number      
1

Overview of the course

At our first meeting, I will make appropriate introductory remarks, describe the contents of the syllabus.

The difference between standard orthography and phonetic transcription.

Phonetic transcription has more than one goal: narrow and broad transcriptions. What is the purpose of the transcription?

Phonetics; how sounds are made.

Source/filter. Link to a good set of slides by Donald Finan, at the University of Colorado.

Vowels versus consonants.

The source-filter model of speech production: the vocal folds produce an acoustic signal with energy distributed over a wide range of frequency, but heavily concentrated on a fundamental frequency and its (integral) multiples, also known as its overtones. The fundamental frequency (F0) is the rate at which the vocal folds open and close.

This spectrum is heavily influenced by the articulatory apparatus above it, primarily the mouth. For most of the consonants, the obstruents, addition obstructions in the mouth give rise to further turbulence, a secondary source of acoustic energy. Vowels do not induce further turbulence, but they act as an echo chamber, strengthening some frequencies and weakening others; consonants do this as well, but in a less elegant and refined way. In short, all the activities of the mouth act as a filter applying to the spectrum created by the larynx. The hearer, in turn, must decode the signal into the pieces of information that gave rise to the complex phonetic signal produced by the speaker. (Source of the source-filter model: Some terms of physics for linguists, by G. Oscar Russell; Language 4(2) 1928.

Organization of sounds by virtue of how they contrast: phonemic inventories and the nature of distinctions. This brings us to right to the edge of phonology, but we're not ready to go there yet.

 

Internet:
The IPA's webpage.
Paul Meier site: very nice interface for IPA vowels, diphthongs, etc. Don't miss this one.
George Dillon's Spoken English
Daniel Currie Hall, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, has developed a terrific online, interactive mid-sagittal section. Don't miss it, and don't leave home without one.

But best of all, I'd say:
Peter Ladefoged, one of the premier phoneticians today, has a great webpage with lots of diagrams, symbols, and sound recordings. Spend a lot of time here. Daniel Hall has a nice webpage that provides links to Ladefoged's files too. You will want to be studying these over the next several classes!

Excellent overview of phonetics and phonology by Peter Coxhead

The sounds of English

  
2

Sounds of French & Spanish

Link for German phonetics: http://www.uni-trier.de/~mein4101/Download/ASUManual.pdf

 

Great link from UIowa with both Spanish and English

The phoneme: definition of a phonemic analysis.


While there is infinite variety in the speech sounds as acoustic events, a linguistic utterance is not just an acoustic event but also a symbolic event, and it expresses a sequence of symbols selected from a reasonably small inventory of more abstract sound-based units that are called phonemes. A phonemic analysis of a language is a set of phonemes (roughly 15 - 50 in number in a given language) which have both a symbolic and a phonetic side to them. As symbols, they are concatenated to form the expression of morphemes, while from a phonetic point of view, they are expressed acoustically by a range of expressions within a bounded region. The limits of the bounded regions may vary from one dialect to another.

Phonology began with the recognition of this stable interior of languages' sound systems cloaked within a massive range of sound varieties. Some variation is free variation; other variation is set by the context in which the phoneme finds itself. With a knowledge of the principles determining the variation (generally language-particular, not universal), utterances and morphemes can be analyzed as sequences of phonemes.

Principles of a satisfactory phonemic analysis of a language:

1. A phonemic analysis A of a language consists of a finite set of phonemes P; each word can be assigned a phonemic representation, which is a sequence of phonemes, and each sequence of phonemes can be realized in one (or more) way(s) which can be expressed by suitable explicit rules.
2. Distinctness: Any two words are either identical in sound, in which case, their phonemic representation is identical, or distinct, in which case their phonemic representations must be distinct.
3. Predictability of realization: The phonetic realization of a phoneme can be conditioned by its phonological environment (i.e., the other sounds that occur in the utterance), but not by anything else. [Be clear on what "anything else" might be!].
4. Minimality: There must be no alternative phonemic analysis A' with fewer phonemes than A.

Key notions: (1) contrast: two sounds are in contrast if there are two distinct words that differ just by the difference between those sounds (key versus tea, for example), (2) conditioned variation: a /t/ is pronounced in one way before a stressed vowel, and another way elsewhere; and (3) free variation: a certain phoneme can be realized in either of two ways with no possible lexical difference between them. (Almost the "you say potato and I say potah-to" case: but "Tate" and "tot" are distinct words in English.)

Please read Phonemic analysis after this class.

 

  
3

More complex phonemic examples


Examples:
1. stop/spirants in Spanish.
2. Aspiration in Porteño Spanish.
3. French mid vowels
4. Affrication and high vowel laxing in Québécois.
5. /ay/-raising in American English.
6. Time permitting: /ae/ tensing in American English

 

 

 

The syllable

Curve and constituency. Arabic word margins; English word margins. Syntax and syllables (Pike, Kuryl)

 

 

  
4

Yawelwani Yokuts

Abstract segments and rule ordering

 

Flapping

A case study of complex distribution 		 
5

Complex tonal systems: Bantu

 

English intonation

 
6

 

The history of linguistics

 

Midterm

 

  
7

The history of phonology

 

Frequency, information theory and phonology

 

 

  
8

Morphology 1

What is a word? What is a morpheme? Can words be broken up (down) into component pieces? Do the pieces have meanings? Allomorphy.

Here are some excellent readings to be found on the Internet. Please look into them, and read around in them. Internet readings:

What is a word? by Larry Trask

Inflectional vs. derivational morphology:
Morphology CSU San Bernardino
Presentations by:

Mark Johnson
Gene Buckley (Penn)
Mark Liberman, Ellen Prince (Penn)
Computational side:
Dr. Peter Coxhead

 

Blind morphological analysis.

Doing linguistics when you don't understand what they are saying.


 
9

Morphology 2

 

American Sign Language 1


Powerpoint presentation on ASL. Pdf

 

Reading assignment: click here.
Please look at: Sign language links.-- especially check out the ASL literature web site.
The range of sign languages around the world; history of the spread of sign languages, and their independence from the spoken languages of their regions. Arbitrariness and iconicity in the ASL lexicon.
Their use of signing space in the lexicon and in expression grammatical relations. Handshape, location, orientation. Battison typology of sign types. Paths.

 
10

ASL 2

Some generalizations about the ASL lexicon (Battison's generalizations). More on word order. Classifiers.

 

(optional class: reading period) Automatic learning of morphology.

The design of software to automatically learn the morphology of a language. See Linguistica's website.

 

  

 

From Bruce Hayes' Phonetics Fonts Page (http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/120a/PhoneticFonts.htm)

 

Linguists often need to use phonetic fonts to depict utterances with phonetic accuracy.  Several free, downloadable phonetic fonts is now available for this purpose, thanks to the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

SIL IPA 93

SIL IPA93 is a collection of True Type phonetic fonts.  These are the old-fashioned kind of font, where the symbols actually replace some of the 224 ASCII symbols that normally would depict other characters.  Therefore, you have to change fonts when you're word processing.

These fonts are currently used in my teaching (handouts and software), though I hope to move beyond them sooner or later.

If you're having trouble getting these fonts to work, go to the SILIPA93 Troubleshooting Page.

Gentium

Another phonetic font is the new Gentium font, also available for free download from SIL.  This is a Unicode font, so you don't have to switch back and forth between fonts when you use it in word processing--Unicode has room for about 65,000 symbols, so every symbol has its own spot in the system.  Gentium in fact is not just a phonetic font; it has the regular Roman letters and supports various foreign languages, too.  The appearance of the font is unusual, if elegant, and I find it a bit tricky to read on the computer screen.

This is a big font, so if you use the Insert, Symbol procedure in Word to insert your symbols, you'll have to scroll down through the various character sets until you get to IPA Extensions, which has what you want.

Doulos SIL Beta

Like Gentium, this font is Unicode, so you don't have to switch back and forth between fonts, and can also do various foreign languages with the same font.  Doulos SIL matches the Times font that most people use for their word processing, which is nice if that's what you're used to.  It shows up clearly on your computer screen.  Lastly, unlike the old SILDoulosIPA93 fonts, it doesn't alter the spacing of lines on the page.  Available for free download from the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Doulos SIL is a big font, so if you use the Insert, Symbol procedure in Word to insert your symbols, you'll want to scroll down through the various character sets until you get to IPA Extensions, which has what you want.

Inserting the Symbols with your Word Processor

I know of two ways to do it.  

One method is to use the numeric keypad; see this handout for how.

The other method assumes you have Microsoft Word, and requires you to develop a system bit by bit:

The first time you need a symbol, go to Insert, then Symbol, then find your phonetic font, then find your symbol.  Click on the symbol to highlight it.  Then click on the Shortcut Key button.  Choose your shortcut key.  

In choosing shortcut keys, I like to use a two-keystroke mnemonic system.  Thus, for the IPA "snake" symbol that represents the sound of the letter sequence "sh", I use Ctr Alt Shift s, h.  Similarly, the a-e digraph for the vowel of "cat" is Ctr Alt Shift a, e.  But you can also use simpler keystrokes for the most common symbols, so for instance I use Ctr e for schwa.

Once you picked your shortcut key combination, click Close, twice.  Now, when you type the shortcut sequence, the symbol will pop onto the screen.  Gradually, you can develop a full set of shortcut keys in this way.

One more thing:  when you set up shortcut keys, the next time you exit Word, you'll be asked if you want to save "normal.dot".  The answer is "yes"; normal.dot contains the information about your shortcut keys.

If you set up all your symbols this way, eventually, you'll remember all the codes and be able to word-process phonetic symbols fairly fluently.  I have to admit, however, that this system works best if you get a lot of opportunities to practice...