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Phonology is a subfield of linguistics which studies the system speakers use to represent language; this includes units of sound in a spoken language and hand movements in a sign language. Although there are potentially infinitely many ways of producing a sound or moving a hand, phonologists are interested only in how these group into abstract categories: for example, how and why speakers of many languages perceive the difference between [l] and [r] as nonsignificant, whereas others consider them distinct enough to distinguish different words. Phonology also goes beyond differences between individual sounds, involving topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent and intonation.

One task in phonology is to identify distinctive units within a language. For example, in English, the words pin and bin seem to each consist of three segments, with only the first differing. Phonologists may refer to these first units as different phonemes, and the contrast between /p/ and /b/ as phonemic - the two words are a minimal pair differing by only one phoneme. Though most phonologists no longer consider phonemes to be psychologically 'real', they remain in phonological study as a kind of shorthand for referring to more complex phonological representations that more adequately explain how such examples differ.

Phonetics focuses on the physical sounds of speech, and thus it often informs phonological inquiry by showing how pronunciations are related. However, since this sort of inquiry does not primarily concern itself with the study of abstract patterns in language, phoneticians' work usually complements linguistics, rather than constituting a central component.

Most writing systems, such as the Roman alphabet used for English, represent phonology in some way, such as the letter b indicating the phoneme /b/, though this relationship is often inexact. This relationship between reading and phonological knowledge is of concern to linguists interested in orthography (written language), language acquisition specialists, and educators concerned with developing literacy.

Phonemic analysis

Part of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. Even though a language may make distinctions between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic sounds. Thus, a phoneme in a particular language can be pronounced in many ways.

Looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the phoneme inventory of a language. A minimal pair is a pair of words from the same language, that differ by only a single sound, and that are recognized by speakers as being two different words. When there is a minimal pair, the two sounds constitute separate phonemes. (It is often not possible to detect all phonemes with this method so other approaches are used as well.)

Phonemic distinctions or allophones

If two similar sounds do not constitute separate phonemes, they are called allophones of the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) can be aspirated. In English, voiceless stops at the beginning of a word are aspirated, whereas after /s/ they are not aspirated. (This can be seen by putting the fingers right in front of the lips and noticing the difference in breathiness as 'pin' and 'spin' is said.) There is no English word 'pin' that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in English, aspirated [pʰ] (the [ʰ] means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of an underlying phoneme /p/. In some other languages, for example Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration versus non-aspiration is phonemic, and therefore speakers will consider them to be significantly different.

Another example of allophones in English is how the /t/ sounds in the words 'tub', 'stub', 'but', and 'butter' are all pronounced differently (in American English at least), yet are all perceived as "the same sound."

Another example: in English and many other languages, the liquids /l/ and /r/ are two separate phonemes (minimal pair 'life', 'rife'); however, in Korean these two liquids are allophones of the same phoneme, and the general rule is that [ɾ] comes before a vowel, and [l] does not (e.g. Seoul, Korea). A native speaker will tell you that the [l] in Seoul and the [ɾ] in Korean are in fact the same sound. What happens is that a native Korean speaker's brain recognises the underlying phoneme /l/, and, depending on the phonetic context (whether before a vowel or not), expresses it as either [ɾ] or [l]. Another Korean speaker will hear both sounds as the underlying phoneme and think of them as the same sound.

Change of a phoneme inventory over time

The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics.

Other topics in phonology

Phonology also includes topics such as the syllable, assimilation, elision, epenthesis, vowel harmony, tone, non-phonemic prosody and phonotactics. Prosody includes topics such as stress and intonation.

Syllables

Main article: Syllable

Native speakers of many languages may well have certain intuitions about how many 'beats' there are in a given word; for example, most English speakers would agree that there are two 'syllables' in the word butter but only one in but. That such phonological intuitions exist is one reason for phonologists to want to find about what syllables are; another reason is that assuming their existence explains a good deal about the way sounds and signs pattern in language.

Syllables cannot be defined through reference to breathing or articulatory movements; they are abstract, phonological units rather than a physical phenomenon. Syllables do not easily correspond to muscular contractions, for instance; nor do they correlate well with predictable changes in pitch. Initially, defining syllables was such a difficult task that early generative phonology ignored it; only in the 1970s and 1980s was a serious reanalysis attempted.

Since the syllable was reintroduced to phonological theory, it has come to be seen as essential in defining the behaviour of segments and stress in many languages. For instance, predicting whether a British English /l/ will be velarised or not is difficult without referring to positions within the syllable: if an [l] forms part of the rhyme of the syllable (the component containing the vowel or syllabic consonant) it will be velarised; if it is part of the onset (the initial part of the syllable), then it will not. The syllable is one of the mechanisms that organise the order and positioning of segments.

Word stress

In some languages, stress is non-phonemic. Some examples include Finnish and all ancient Germanic languages (Old Norse, Old English and Old High German) as well as some modern Germanic languages such as Icelandic. However, in other modern-day Germanic languages such as German or English, stress is phonemically distinctive, although there are only a few minimal pairs. In German, for example, /ˈaugust/, the personal name August, contrasts with /auˈgust/ , the month August.

The distinction of stress is often seen in English words where the verb and noun forms have the same spelling. For example, consider /ˈrɛbəl/ 'rebel' the noun (which places the emphasis on the first syllable) contrasted with /rɪˈbɛl/ 'rebel' the verb (which instead puts the emphasis on the second syllable).

Another example is the pair insight /ˈɪnsaɪt/ and incite /ɪnˈsaɪt/, where in the former the stress lies on the first syllable and in the latter on the second syllable. In some regional pronunciations of American English, the words Missouri and misery are also distinguished only by stress: in Missouri, the stress lies on the penultimate syllable, but in misery it lies on the first syllable.

Theories of phonology

Generative phonology

Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle's 1968 work The Sound Pattern of English (SPE) formed the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations were a sequence of segments which are underlain by distinctive features. These features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set, and have the binary values + or -. For example, [+voice] would be a featured underlying distinctively voiced segments such as [v] or [g]. Ordered phonological rules govern how this underlying representation is transformed into the actual articulation in speech (the surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the 'generativists' integrated morphology with phonology.

Autosegmental phonology

In 1976 John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena were no longer seen as one linear sequence of segments, known as feature combinations, but rather as "some parallel sequences"" of features which reside on multiple tiers.

Optimality theory

In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed Optimality Theory — an overall architecture for phonology, according to which languages choose the phonetic form of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints which are ordered by importance: a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when this is necessary in order to satisfy a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, and has become one of the dominant trends in phonology.

Government phonology

Government Phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters. That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, though parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures include Jonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette and John Harris.

Natural phonology

In the late 1960s, David Stampe introduced Natural Phonology. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active and which are suppressed are language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously (though the output of one process may be the input to another). The principles of Natural Phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded Natural Morphology.

References

• Chomsky N & Halle M (1968) The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0262530972.
• Connor CM, Morrison FJ, Fishman BJ, Schatschneider C & Underwood P (2007) 'The early years: algorithm-guided individualized reading instruction.' Science 315: 464-465.
• Davenport M & Hannahs SJ (2005) Introducing Phonetics and Phonology. London: Arnold. ISBN 0-340-81045-9.
• Frost R & Katz L (eds) (1992) Orthography, Phonology, Morphology and Meaning. Amsterdam: Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-444-89140-2.
• Hooper JB (1972) 'The syllable in phonological theory.' Language 48: 525-540.
• Laver J (1994) Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521456555.
• Selkirk EO (1984) On the major class features and syllable theory. In Aronoff M & Oerhle RT (eds) Language Sound Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp.107-136. ISBN 978-0262010740.
• Young-Scholten M (2002) Orthographic input in L2 phonological development. In Burmeister P, Piske T & Rohde A (eds) An Integrated View of Language Development: Papers in Honor of Henning Wode. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. pp.263-279. ISBN 3-88476-488-8.