Introduction to Linguistics 2: Winter 2008

January 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.

January 15:Sounds of French, Spanish; major classes: V/C; sonorants, obstruents, sonority hierarchy.

January 22: More complex phonemic examples.

January 31: A case study of complex distribution: the case of the flap in American English.

February 21 Frequency, information, and phonology

February 26 Morphology 1

January 3:

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

ii. Kongo obstruents

January 10:

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

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.

i. Isthmus Zapotec

ii. Tonkawa

January 17:

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

For your own interest, if you want, take a look at: Leonard Bloomfield: The stressed vowels of American English. Language 11(2) 97-116. 1935.

i. Lamba

ii. Navajo

iii. Palauan

January 24:

Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, Generative Phonology: Section on Yokuts.

How do Americans flap their /t/s?

January 31: Complex tonal system and English intonation

Reading from Week 1, Section 8, on prosody.

John Goldsmith: English as a tone language.

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.

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.

February 21

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.

January 3: An overview of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and the sound side of language.

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

January 5: The sounds of English.

January 10: Sounds of French, Spanish; major classes: Sonorants, obstruents, sonority hierarchy. Beginning to discussion of the phoneme.

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

Great link from UIowa with both Spanish and English

January 12: 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.

January 17: 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

January 19: History of treatment of the syllable. typology (Kaye and Lowenstamm). Curve and constituency. Arabic word margins; English word margins. Syntax and syllables (Pike, Kuryl)

January 24:

Yawelwani Yokuts: abstract segments and rule ordering

January 26:

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

January 31: Complex tonal system.

February 2: English intonation

Feb. 7:

Current theories in phonology

Feb 9: Midterm

February 14: History of all phonology

February 16:Frequency, Information theory and phonology

February 21: 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

February 28.

March 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.

ASL 2
Some generalizations about the ASL lexicon (Battison's generalizations). More on word order. Classifiers.

March 9: (optional class: reading period) Automatic learning of morphology. The design of software to automatically learn the morphology of a language. See Linguistica's website.