Introduction to Linguistics 2: Winter 2009

John Goldsmith Office: Classics 307

Office hours Monday to be determined, and I'm available a lot of the time otherwise -- just call or email.

goldsmith@uchicago.edu

My webpage

Teaching assistants: Adam Baker, Tommy Grano.

Discussion section:

Monday 4pm; and another section, time to be determined.

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. If you are a Latex fan, that's great; there are excellent resources for linguists using Latex that I can tell you about, the most important of which involves using the TIPA package. I strongly encourage you to learn to use Latex -- it is definitely worth the effort.

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 traditional things:
40% Homework
20% Midterm (Feb. 12)
15% Paper due at the end of Week 9 (March 4)
25% Final
Attendence is obligatory (for you as for me); let your TA know if you can't make it to class. In reality, class participation can't help but be relevant, too. (Don't believe anyone who says it isn't.)

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.

Homeworks are discussed in the section(s) following the week in which they are assigned, and solutions are due on the Thursday of that (following) week.

The paper should be about 3 or 4 pages long. They should be descriptive: describe something interesting that you find in English or in your native language, using the terms and concepts that we have discussed in this course. You do not need to do library research, but I recommend it. Here is what I would recommend: browse through the journal American Speech, which you can read online through the library. The articles are utterly fascinating, and will give you great ideas. Pursue something raised in one of the articles there. Please don't write this paper at the last minute -- it will be a lot easier for you if you pick a topic a couple weeks into the course, and let the topic percolate in your mind over a couple of weeks.

 

Overview

Important note regarding January 8: There will be no class on January 8. The Linguistics Society of America has its meeting today in San Francisco, and virtually the whole Linguistics Department will be there. Therefore this lecture will replace January 13's lecture; and I will give January 13's lecture during the section meetings of week 2.
Week number Tuesday Thursday
1 January 6 & 8

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.*No class today; see note above.*mp3
2 January 13 & 15

Sounds of French & Spanish

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

The phoneme

...as pure language-specific classification of sounds.mp3
3 January 20 & 22

Directionality in the description of a language's sounds, and neutralization

...and generative phonology.

Rule ordering
4 January 27 & 29

Distinguishing morphophonemics and phonology.

Discussion and more examples

5 February 3 & 5

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

English intonation
6 February 10 & 12

History of all of linguistics

Midterm
7 February 17 & 19

History of phonology

Frequency, information, and phonology
8 February 24 & 26

Morphology 1

Blind morphological analysis
9 March 3 & 5

Morphology 2

ASL 1
10 March 10 & 12

ASL 2

 Optional class today

Automatic morphological analysis

 

Readings and assignments

Note: I've included a number of optional reading assignments. Most of them strike me as relatively difficult for a beginning student to read, but I have tried to put only papers that you might well appreciate. I've put several of my papers in this reading, papers which were meant for a broad audience, and they will give you some explanation for why I've emphasized certain topics during the course.

Timing: read the papers before the week for which they are assigned. The recommended papers can be read as you see fit.

Week number Assignment based on this week's work Reading for this week. All of this is available on the Chalk site.
1 No homework assignment to hand in from this week's work.

Class 2: O'Grady et al.: Pp 15-37; 42; 44-49. There is a lot of detail in this chapter, but basically you need to know it all. A few point here and there might count as a bit obscure, but not much: this is all quite important. By the way, the Wikipedia article on the IPA is actually quite good, so read it to get a broader perspective on the material that is covered in the assigned reading above and in class. (Wikipedia articles on linguistics have not been very good, although many have improved recently due to an organized effort.)

2 1. O'Grady et al: Exercises 2-7, 9, 10 on pp. 52ff.

2. Read this whole assignment before you start it:
Transcribe the first paragraph of "Comma gets a cure"(see just below for text) as you yourself pronounce it. Write the transcription immediately underneath the words (so the standard spelling should be triple spaced). If you can type your own transcription, that would be better, but if you can't, write neatly.

Then transcribe the following recording, up to "headed for work." (that's a little over 30 seconds--don't transcribe the announcer at the beginning!): Link to London RP. Put this transcription right underneath the first transcription (i.e., so the written word, your pronunciation, and the London pronunciation are immediately stacked on top of each other, on successive lines).

O'Grady et al: Pp. 57-83. Appendix: Hints for solving phonology problems, pp. 99-101.On features (this is really for class 5): pp. 108-109. And reread the material in last week's reading assignment that focuses on the phonemes of English.

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

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

3

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

2. Lamba

3. Navajo. This problem is tough (until you figure out the solution). The crucial thing is to formulate clear hypotheses about what the underlying forms of the two prefixes are. In addition, think outside the box with regard to the conditioning environment for the rule that changes the point of articulation of the fricatives.

4. Transcribe the two following recordings, up to "headed for work" (that is, the first paragraph). Link to Alabama speaker. Link to New York speaker. Align the two transcriptions, like you did last week.

Classes 5 and 6: Abigail Cohn: Phonology. Chapter 8 in The Handbook of Linguistics, ed. by Aronoff and Rees-Miller.

Morris Halle: The Rules of Language. (NB: This pdf does not quite reach the end of the original paper.)
4

1. Tonkawa

(Optional:) Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, Generative Phonology: Section on Yokuts.

 
5 No assignment: study for midterm!

For class 9: What is phonology? (ms.), chapter 1.

For class 10: English intonation: Reread the section of the reading from Week 1, Section 8, on prosody, and also:

English as a tone language.
6 Midterm week

1. Tagalog.

2. Optional problem: Okpe vowel system. This is a hard problem, whose solution is very similar to that of Yokuts, which is discussed in the optional reading for Week 4. You must really understand the discussion of the Yokuts problem to get this one right.

Class 11: From algorithms to generative grammar and back again.

Class 12: Midterm.
7 i. Indonesian prefixes.

Class 13: John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks: On the origins, principles, and successors to generative phonology.

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

Class 14: Probabilistic models of grammar: phonology as information minization.
8 i. Blind morphology problem, part 1

Class 15: Andrew Spencer:Morphology. Chapter 9 in The Handbook of Linguistics, ed. by Aronoff and Rees-Miller.

Mc: Meaning in the marketplace . Lentine and Shuy, 1990.

9 i. Second part of blind problem.

Of Sputniks, Beatniks, and Nogoodniks. Kabakchi and Doyle. 1990.

Class 18-19: Wendy Sandler and Diane Lillo-Martin: Natural Sign Languages. Chapter 22 in The Handbook of Linguistics, ed. by Aronoff and Rees-Miller.
10  

 



"Comma gets a cure."

Well, here's a story for you: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower. That area was much nearer for her and more to her liking. Even so, on her first morning, she felt stressed. She ate a bowl of porridge, checked herself in the mirror and washed her face in a hurry. Then she put on a plain yellow dress and a fleece jacket, picked up her kit and headed for work.

When she got there, there was a woman with a goose waiting for her. The woman gave Sarah an official letter from the vet. The letter implied that the animal could be suffering from a rare form of foot and mouth disease, which was surprising, because normally you would only expect to see it in a dog or a goat. Sarah was sentimental, so this made her feel sorry for the beautiful bird.

Before long, that itchy goose began to strut around the office like a lunatic, which made an unsanitary mess. The goose's owner, Mary Harrison, kept calling, "Comma, Comma," which Sarah thought was an odd choice for a name. Comma was strong and huge, so it would take some force to trap her, but Sarah had a different idea. First she tried gently stroking the goose's lower back with her palm, then singing a tune to her. Finally, she administered ether. Her efforts were not futile. In no time, the goose began to tire, so Sarah was able to hold onto Comma and give her a relaxing bath.

Once Sarah had managed to bathe the goose, she wiped her off with a cloth and laid her on her right side. Then Sarah confirmed the vet's diagnosis. Almost immediately, she remembered an effective treatment that required her to measure out a lot of medicine. Sarah warned that this course of treatment might be expensive-either five or six times the cost of penicillin. I can't imagine paying so much, but Mrs. Harrison-a millionaire lawyer-thought it was a fair price for a cure.

Here are some more specific -- and a bit random-- notes on particular class meetings:

Class 1

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.

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 of the past century, had 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!

Class 4: 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.

Class 15: Morphology

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

Mark Liberman, Ellen Prince (Penn)

 

 

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

 

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.

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...