Phonology: Systems of Sounds

What evidence suggests that the sounds of a language are organized in a systematic fashion?

What makes a sound contrast in a language?

What makes a sound predictable in a language?

What is the difference between a phone and a phoneme?

What is the relation between a phoneme and its allophones?

Can you hear a phoneme? Anderson has posted an article on the history of the phoneme concept.

What makes a sound distinctive/contrastive in a language?

What is the relation between a phoneme and meaning?

Why are sounds/phones distributed in language-specific patterns?

What are some examples of phonological rules for English?

What is the connection between complementary distribution and predictability for sounds?

What help do natural classes of sounds provide in detecting the conditioning environments of an allophone?

How do you identify the basic allophone?

What do phonotactic constraints reveal about the organization of language sounds?

What do prosodic rules demonstrate about the organization of language sounds?

What is the connection between an implicational law and the distribution of sounds across languages?

Can implicational laws be explained by:

       1. language acquisition

       2. historical change

       3. the ease of sound production

       4. the ease of sound perception

Why do languages persist in using unusual/infrequent sounds?

This week’s lecture notes

Assignment: ex. 17, 26 Sindhi, 27 Standard Italian, 31 Korean, 38 Farsi, 40 Greek

Due: Feb. 28th