語音音韻專題一:元音與輔音研究

Syllabus Phonetics and Phonology – Part I: Segments and syllables We will discuss seven topics in phonology and phonetics, in two lectures each. Exercises aimed at reinforcing students’ understanding will be an important part of the course. The course is based on the first half of the fourth edition of Understanding Phonology (2017, Carlos Gussenhoven & Haike Jacobs, Taylor & Francis). 1. Structures in languages. Students become aware of the structural nature of languages, by seeing how art forms restrict the kinds of words that are used in poetry and song. They will also understand the ‘dual articulation of language’, the separate structures for morphology and syntax on the one hand and phonology on the other. The first encodes meaning, the other pronunciation. 2. The production of speech. We will see how our ‘organs of speech’, from the lungs to the lips, produce speech. The larynx, as well as the oral and nasal chambers above it, play important parts. The larynx works much like a sound source, while the oral and nasal chambers act as resonators. Besides, the oral chamber itself offers opportunities for sound sources. 3. Some typology: sameness and difference. Languages vary in the complexity of their sound systems. There are languages with some 12 sounds, but also ones with over ten times as many. Sounds are not randomly distributed across languages: some are very common and others are very rare. When sounds are rare in the languages of the world, they will also occur less often in the words of the languages that have them. 4. Making the form fit. Any sound may only appear before a subset of the language’s sounds, which can easily be seen in syllables, for instance. Because no two languages are the same, the effects of such restrictions will appear in loan words. English icecream, which has two syllables ([aɪs.krim]), comes out as as [a.i.se.ke.rim] in Korean, as [ai.su.ku.ri.mu] in Japanese, and as [ʔai.ka.ki.li.ma], [ai.ka.li.ma] or [hau.ka.li.ma] in Hawaiian. Within a language, similar effects occur in derivation. In Leti, a phrase must not end in a consonant. As a result, [wuar] ‘mountain’ appears as [wuura] at the end of a phrase. Chomsky and Halle’s Serial Rule Order and Prince & Smolensky’s Optimality Theory are two types of grammar that can describe such effects. 5. Distinctive features. A vowel or a consonant has an internal structure, specified in features like ‘dorsal’, ‘voiced’, and ‘sonorant’. A feature analysis of a language’s sound inventory should make it possible to groups of sounds that behave the same in the phonology. 6. Describing places of articulation. Many features specify the place in the mouth where sounds are articulated. By using the same feature set for vowels and consonants, we can characterize interactions between them, like the rounding of vowels after labial consonants ([bi] -> [bu]) and the palatalization of dorsal consonants ([ki] -> [cji]). We will look at the sound systems of a number of languages. 7. Connnecting underlying and surface representations. In our brain, words are stored in a single phonological shape. Often, however, words have different shapes in different contexts, as when the Leti word for ‘mountain’ is spoken as [wuar] medially in a phrase, but as [wuura] finally. We will distinguish this kind of variation from dialectal and stylistic variation.