Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Introduction to Linguistics
Fall 2006
Week 4 - Questions for homework and discussion
Intro. to Ling., pp. 66-104
1. What are some of the major sound changes described in the book?
There are many different types of phonological change. Below let`s first take a look at types of change before we look in more depth at certain specific changes that occur in English.
Alteration - place, manner, voicing (quality)
In this type of change some part of a sound, or class of sounds, for we have seen that often a whole class of sounds will change in the same way, changes in a specific linguistic environment. This does not result in any change to the phonemic inventory of a language, and often results in increased allophonic variation. An example would be the aspiration of /t/in syllable initial positions (t---->th/s_).
Merge
This is a type of change where a sound or group of sounds join with another preexisting group of sounds to become one sound or one group of sounds. An example would be the inter-dental fricatives. In some dialects of English they are changing. For example in Irish English they are merged with dental-alveolar stops, but in other dialects they are merged with labio-dental fricatives. In merger, no new sounds are created to the inventory, but a sound might be dropped. Another example is the /hw/, which is spoken in only some dialects. In the distant past /hw/ and /w/ were distinct sounds. But now the former is an allophone of the latter in most dialects and in many North American dialects it has disappeared entirely.
Split
This is when one sound or group of sounds split into one or more sounds or groups of sounds. This has happened in English in the past in respect to the sound /f/. At one time there was only one sound, but pressure from French borrowings and the overriding system created the sound /v/ first as an allophone and then as distinctive sound in its own right. This can be compared to Dutch (one of the closest relatives to English) where the relationship between /f/ and /v/ is not as neat or clean and change is still going on in relation to these two sounds. This type of change is often seen in vowels as well. At some point in time we could posit that the sounds /i/ and /I/ were one sound (/i/), but that the sound split into the two sounds we now have in English in the Germanic languages. Most other Indo-European languages eg. Spanish) do not both these sounds.
Replacement
This a change by which one sound or group of sounds is replaced by another sound. The distinction here with merge is that the sound which replaces another can result in the creation of a totally new sound.
Dropping
This is a change where a sound or group of sounds will be dropped in a certain linguistic environment.
Insertion
This is a change in which a certain sound will be inserted into a certain linguistic environment.
Here are some specific types of consonant change.
flapping
glottalization
yod-dropping
insertion
Here are some specific types of vowels changes
diphthongization
monophthongization
2. What do these sound changes tell us about how sounds are stored in the brain?
The overall systematic nature of sound change tells us that there must be some integration with the mental lexicon. The clearest examples of this are the push and pull chains that we see in vowel change. Unless the overall system of vowels were not encoded in the mental lexicon we would not expect to see such types of changes. Sound changes, as we see from looking especially at diachronic sound change, often occur residually to preserve the shape of a system.
Also, the location of certain sounds with in a word bear importance in the mental lexicon. There are many way in which words are arranged in the mental lexicon, but one of the major ones is based on the beginning sequences of a word. When listening, or when going to produce an utterance, a person will access the necessary word by moving down a list. This list is based, in part, on the first sounds in the word. Research has shown that words which begin with the same sound sequence are located together in the lexicon. Likewise, the final sequences of words are also of some importance. We have seen that phonological rules make reference to word boundaries, both initial and final. This means that such boundaries have psychological reality, not only in phonology, but in the mental lexicon as well. From a more practical point of view, we can say that people need to pay closer attention to word boundaries. What is in the middle of a word is often of less importance. (Not surprisingly, it is vowel sounds that are usually centrally located in words. We have seen that vowels show more variation than consonants and are subject to change at a more rapid pace as well. This only lends more credence to what had been posited above.
`What the hell do I care`, and `how does this effect me as a teacher of English` might be questions you are asking yourself. Well, do not forget. How the lexicon works is universal. It is the same in all languages regardless of genetic affiliation or writing system. This means that we as teachers need to try to focus on the initial and final segments of sounds in words when teaching new vocabulary. It also means that for pronunciation consonants need more attention since they are the things in English which come in these important locations.
3. What are minimal pairs and why are they important?
Making a minimal pairs chart is the first step in conducting any phonological research on a language. Minimal pairs are the sounds which cause meaning distinctions in a language. They are called pairs because words which only differ in one sound but have meaning differences (are actually different words) are used to show this distinction and such words are usually arranged in pairs. Minimal pairs are usually a list of individual words which differ in only one sound. By creating lists of minimal pairs linguists can determine the phonemic inventory of the language the are studying. Minimal pairs and phonemic inventories are all language specific although they do follow universals as we shall soon see. By using minimal pairs we can also make distinctions between what is part of the phonemic inventory (phonemes) and the phonetic inventory of a language Allophones and allophonic variation).
4. Give and explain an example of allophonic variation in either English or Korean.
In English, there is a tremendous amount of allophonic variation surrounding the sound /t/. Framer and Demers (1996) identify six different allophones of the phoneme /t/. They are [th], [?t], [?], [D], [t], and [t]. All of these, with the exception of the last one, occur in specific environments. This means that they are examples of phonologically conditioned variation. We know that the last sound [t] is the phone not the allophone because it occurs in the most environments, i.e., all the environments in which the others do not occur. Once we know this we can write up phonological rules which show how these allophones are derived from the phone.
/t/--->[th] /s__
/t/--->[?t] /__#
/t/--->[?] /__/n/(syllabic)
/t/--->[D] /V(stressed)__V
/t/--->[t(palatal)] /s__/r/
In Korean, there is allophonic variation among the sounds /s/ and [ʃ]. The sounds /s/ and [ʃ] are in complementary distributions. One occurs when the other doesn`t.
5. How does the sonority principle determine initial and final consonant clusters in English?
The sonority principle revolves around the idea that certain sounds have different levels of sonorance. We talked about this just last week in our evaluation of how different sounds are made. Now, the whole idea behind the sonority principle is that patterns of sonority within a syllable must be regular. In English, this generally means a rising falling pattern. Since vowels have the most sonorance, they are usually found in the middle. The principle has been used to show whey certain consonant clusters are permissible and why others are not allowed to occur.
6. Explain the difference between an underlying representation and a surface representation in phonology?
It goes without saying that for change to occur it must occur from somewhere. Everything that happens must have a starting point. As we have seen language is filled with variation of all kinds, but this variation must come from somewhere. This somewhere is posited to be deep in the brain. According to Chomsky all native speakers of a language have the same competence. It is what we do with that competence that creates variety in language. In order to build a theory around this simple idea and find the place from which all variation comes, linguists have posited that language occurs on at least two different levels.
The Underlying Representation (UR) is the form that is common to all native speakers of a language. It is the form of the word that is housed in the mental lexicon. URs are made up of phones alone. URs are how language is housed and where it begins. When we go to use a word the UR is changed, through phonological rules to a Surface Representation (SR). The SR is what we actually say and is created from the UR. Different speakers of the same language will have a wide variety of SRs but these will come from the identical set of URs. This is a simple, but extremely important distinction which differentiates Chomskian or Generative linguistics from other schools of linguistics.
Take for example, English past formation. The past is marked on words using one of three allomorphs ([t][d][Id]). A quick study will reveal that [d] is the morph and the other two can be derived from /d/. In the UR, the past tense is always marked by /d/ and the allophones need to be derived from that form through phonological rules to create the acceptable surface forms. Simple isn`t it?
7. What are distinctive features and how do generativists use them?
Distinctive features are the building blocks of sounds. Once more, they are universal. All sounds in human language are made up of certain small features. These features are different for consonants and vowels. Each sound in all the world`s languages has a particular value based on the features they have an those they do not have. For each feature a sound will have a + or - value. A plus value means that the feature is present in the sound, minus of course means that the feature is not present. A chart can be made based on these distinctive features which differentiates every sound from every other sound based on the configuration of the different values in relation to the features.
The goal is to show distinction by using as few features as possible. Distinctive features are also used to show phonological change because, as we have seen above from our discussion of such change, it is not the entire sounds which change, but merely certain features. By writing phonological rules using distinction features we are not only writing much more precise rules, but are also showing universal tendencies in language.
General Comments
Part 1- Section 4 - Sound change
The main purpose of the section on sound change is to get you to understand that changes in sound are rule governed and systematic. The list of different changes that they give in this section might seem to be annoying and pointless at first but there are sound reasons why they put this information here. The first is so that they can simplify the following section on phonological processes which is complicated enough as it is and has the potential to become dangerously more so. The authors also present this material in this way because it follows the basic historical progression of the field of linguistics.
The field of linguistics originated from an interest in the historical development of language and the relations between languages. The first modern linguists were people who were very interested in the relationships in time and space of different European languages. They started their investigations in the area of phonology for one simple reason; there is a greatly limited number of phonemes. Phonemes are the primary building blocks of language and really can`t be ignored. It is also relatively easy to break phonemes down into their respective groupings.
Early linguists (Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, and Jakob Grimm to name a few) sought to determine how different languages were related to each other based on correspondences in sound. This sounds easy, but all the work you read about in this section are the based on research that was conducted many years ago. They found that there was much more to sounds than just what we hear. Sounds and languages are living entities, constantly moving and shifting. The real interest in not in the sounds themselves but how certain sounds change into other sounds and maybe even why.
Finding similar sounds in languages is not enough to determine how languages are related, we also have to know how (and maybe why) these changes came about. For example, the word house in English is realized as Haus in High German, hus in Danish, and huis in Dutch. It is obvious that all these words are the really the same word, but how did these changes come about to make the words seem different? What about Spanish casa? Is it the same word too. If so, how? Such questions forced historical and comparative linguists to try to come up with a description of how sounds in language change. At first the work on this was quite simple and merely descriptive, but as time went on and more data was collected, these linguists began to formulate not just descriptions of changes that had taken place, but predictions of future changes based on principles of sound change. Such a development paved the way for the advent of modern phonological theory.
A basic understanding of sound change necessarily forces someone to think about language two dimensionally. By looking at sounds change we come to realize that sounds are made up of building blocks and that it is at the level of these building blocks that sounds change, not the entire sounds. This was a monumental step in the development of modern linguistic thought.
Here I will go into a quite brief description for the purposes of clarification of some of the major sound changes described in the book.
Consonant Change
Consonant change generally occurs across three areas in English; MOA, POA and voicing. In Korean consonant change occurs across MOA, POA, aspiration, and lateralization.
One of the most common changes in English is voicing, a process through which a voiceless sound is voiced (they identify one version of this, flapping, in the book). It often happens that when a voiceless consonant comes between vowels (which are all voiced in English) it is often voiced over time. Just look at my name; Stephen. The consonant in the middle is pronounced as a voiced labio-dental fricative although it is spelled `ph`. (This name came from Greek where the letter φ is a voiceless labio-dental fricative. Over time, the sound was voiced due to the fact that it is surrounded by voiced sounds. This is called co-articulatory factors. The sound changed over time so that one feature could be carried over a longer range.
Another common change is one involving manner of articulation. Often sounds change where the POA stays the same while the MOA changes. The visa versa is also true. Most dialects of Irish English, for example, do not have the phonemes /ɵ/ or /ð /. These sounds, in all environments are replaced by /t/ and /d/ respectively or in some dialects by /th/. That becomes /that/ and this becomes /this/ or /dis/. There are many more types of consonant changes, but it is not important to go over each of them, the basic underlying principles are all we need to know.
Vowel change
Like consonants, vowels in English change across three main areas; relative height, relative frontness, (these two can be equated with POA in consonants) and rounding. (Length is not a feature in English vowels.) Vowel changes tend to be more complex than consonant changes because vowels seem to function not only as individual units, but as members of a collective system. For this reason we have all the changes that we have in consonants (changes in height, fronting or backing) and then some. There are such things as chains of change.
Chains occur due to the interrelatedness of nouns as a single system. If one noun is raised, for example, /e/ becomes /i/, many potential problems are caused. A whole (or gap) is left where /e/ used to be. Something has to move in there to fill the gap. This is called a pull chain because sounds are pulled in to fill the gap. On the other side, since /e/ has become /i/, many of the words which used to use /i/ may no longer be distinguishable. This forces the old /i/ to move somewhere else. Such movement is called a push chain. Chains are not always necessary, however, and often vowels will merge togther or a single vowel might even split to form two different vowels without there being any chain-like repercussions.
Why vowel change sometimes leads to chains and sometimes not has been a topic of discussion among linguists for a long time. The most reasonable answer to this question seems to be very complex. It depends on the phonetic structure of the language as well as the socio-linguistic situation. Languages seem to go through certain periods when change occurs more widely and often more rapidly. These periods often occur in times of great social (internally or externally driven) change.
In the past it was believed that all change was systematic. If one vowel changed on one environment, then it followed, so the theory states, that all instances of the same vowel in the same environment will also change. This is the systematic nature of sound change. Change, however, often occurs in stages. It might take a long time, hundreds of years for changes to occur. Changes, themselves, then are gradual and not immediate, even though the effect is immediate in that all vowels undergoing the change will be changed everywhere at the same time.
This early theory was called into question recently. It has been noted that not all instances of a sound undergoing change will be changed at the same time. This newer theory, called lexical diffusion, states that the semantic nature of a word, not its phonetic makeup, often plays an important role in sound change. In language, then there are often conflicting systems which battle to see who wins out in the great fight of precedence. Remember this idea because it is an important one and we will return to it.
Links
What do all these changes tell us about the mental lexicon and phonology? They tell us a lot. As can be read in Aitchison (1987) words are stored in the metal lexicon in clumps. The words in the clumps seem to share certain phonemic as well as prosodic information. Since prosody (it has been argued in Aitchison and shown in Intro to Ling) works in determining the syllable structure of a word, then it seems right that both phonemic as well as syllabic, prosodic information is stored in the mental lexicon. How does this help us with our understanding of phonology? The mere fact that syllable structure is not haphazard, as is often thought, but is the product or a sophisticated set of rules and cannot, in fact, de at all divorced from the sounds themselves, is indicative of the fact that there is something bigger going on here. If these things are encoded in the mental lexicon, we have to wonder how. It would not be logical to assume that the brain has a prosody curve and a whole list of various information about each individual word next to its basic representation in the brain. Speakers, when asked to think of certain words, came up with words with the same or similar phonemic structure. Once more, their mistakes are not far different then the sound change date we observed in this section of Intro to Ling. There has to be a tie in. There has to be a larger system which is controlling all this. The brain has to know that there is something similar about sounds like /p, t, k/ /r , l/. Let`s see what it is.
Part 1 - Section 5 - Phonemes, syllables, and phonological processes
Before we can begin doing phonology (The study of the sound system of a language, how the particular sounds contrast in each language to form an integrated system for encoding information and how such systems differ from one another.) there is one big thing we have to do first. You can`t do work on the sound system of a language if you don`t know how many actual sounds make up that system. Luckily for us linguists have come up with an easy way of determining this magic number of phonemes (the basic, abstract, sounds that make up the composition of a particular language). The way we do this is by making a list of minimal pairs.
Minimal pairs are words with different meaning which differ by only one sound, like mat and pat or ball and bowl. It might take some time to think about, but in the end we have a list of all the phonemes for a language. The phonemes are not all the sounds that a language has. It is meaning-based and is, therefore, a list of all the sounds which are able to change meaning in a given language.
Aspiration in Korean is a phonemic feature because the meaning of words in Korean changed based on whether a plosive is aspirated or not. In English, however, this is not the case. Aspiration in English does not cause a meaning difference and is predictable based on its environment. The word environment in linguistics means the sounds surrounding one sound. Aspiration in English only occurs in English when a voiceless plosive is located word initially and alone making the phones [ph], [th], and [kh]. These phones, [ph], [th], and [kh], are allophones of their respective phonemes (/p/, /t/, and /k/). Allophones are derived from the phonemes.
In such situations how do we know which one (/t/ or [th]) is the phone and which is the phoneme? It is simple. The one with the largest use (widest distribution) in the language is the phoneme. The sound with a more minimal, often predictable use, is the phone. Phones do not effect meaning. Korean, for example, has both sounds /r/ /l/, but which one is the phone and which is the phoneme. Based on the wider use of /l/, it is the phoneme. /r/, while a sound in Korean is a phone and can only be used if we are doing a narrow transcription of the language.
Returning to our brief discussion of Irish English deletion of the inter-dental fricatives brings us to a problem. In Irish English /ð / and /ɵ/ are replaced by /t/ and /d/ universally (everywhere). How then do speakers of Irish English know the difference between the words /dis/ `this` and /dis/ `to insult someone`? Well, phonologists have come up with a great answer. They say that all have a surface representation (SR) or surface form (that is the one that is actually said) and an underlying representation (UR) from which the surface representations are formed. Words are stored in our brain in their UR along with some phonological which apply to turn the UR into the SR. All words have both an UR and a SR, but they need not be different. Some times they are the same. This idea created a huge advancement in phonological theory and certainly did not end here.
Many years before Chomsky and Halle (1968) came up with the idea of surface and underlying representations, work was going on the city of Prague which would make all this possible. In the 1930s a man named Trubetskoy, along with Roman Jakobsen was busy trying to break sounds down further. Trubetskoy and Jakobsen called their theory distinctive feature theory. The basic premise behind this theory is that sounds (phonemes) are each made up of a set of features. Each phoneme in a language, indeed in the world, has a different set of features which separates and differentiates it from any other phoneme. These features are derived from phonetic data, which is logical as they are sounds made in our mouths. This list of phonetic features (distinctive feature matrix) is often language specific. The features as marked as being either + or - depending on the presence or absence of the feature respectively.
The phoneme /b/ can, then, be described as a +consonantal, -approximate, -sonorant, -continuant, -nasal, -lateral, +voiced, +labial sound. Sounds good doesn`t it? Actually it seems much more complicated than simply calling /b/ a voiced bilabial plosive. There, are however, very good reasons why we need to use feature descriptions in linguistics.
Instead then of taking about the phonemes themselves we can talk about individual features of the phonemes. This is very important when we go to write some phonological rules. The underlying representation of my name, for example, is //stifən//. In order to get from //stifən// to /stivən/ we do not have to write the rule as /f/ becomes /v/ blablabla. We can just say that the -voice, +cont, +labial, +cons sound becomes voiced. We use the distinctive features to make the rule. When rules are written we use only as many different distinctive features as are necessary.
Basically a phone and a phoneme are the same, but they occur on different levels. The phoneme is the representation of a sound that is actually stored in the brain. It is what is projected into the UR of a word. A phoneme is a kind of idyllic dream because the sound is often changed in actual use. When the UR moves to the surface and becomes an SR the phoneme becomes a phone. Now this is made more difficult by the fact that often there are different, but
related versions of the same sound. In a set of sounds that have the same origin, the sounds are called allophones. Of all the allophones, the one sound that is most basic is called the phone. The phone, then, is the bridge between allophones and the phoneme because phone is an allophone, but at the same time the phoneme. Out of all the allophones, the phone is the one that has a wider range of distribution. It occurs in more places that the other allophones. This means that we need to derive the other sounds (the other allophones) from the phone. We do this by writing rules.
CogLing., pp. 30-52
8. How do extensions from spatial relations clearly demonstrate the point that meaning is conceptualization and not simple representations from the world?
There are invisible trajectories (A) and disappearances into invisible realms (B)
A. She set out for Nepal. (No clear exit point and thus no traceable trajectory)
B. The fire went out. The sun came out.
There are entirely conceptual trajectories.
C. That idiot let the cat out of the bag.
There are further extensions /exits from previous states/conditions.
D. Better freaked out and smacked me.
E. The city blacked out and the looting commenced.
Many of these examples have no relation at all to the real physical world. While their core meaning does. The basic idea behind radial categories is that uses (related to their concepts) spread out form a core but in different and often unrelated directions. Concepts underlying radial category show a very clear indication that both language and cognition really do start in the realm of physical and are extended into the realm of the cognitive in systematic but often very different ways. What we get a simple extension from one central core in several different directions. It is in his first in the extensions that uses move from physical to cognitive realm and often have a foot in both. From these initial extensions we get further extensions which bring words in their uses wholly into a cognitive realm. These extensions are based, as we should probably surmised by now, on metaphorical extensions.
9. What is the nature of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and can a clear one be supported?
No! The relation between semantics and pragmatics is not at al a clear one. Though we can clearly see from the examples here that the presence of certain words, verbs or nouns, principally seem to effect the meaning of a preposition (semantic relations) it is also clear that knowledge of the world separate from semantic meaning also has an effect on how prepositions will be interpreted. This is especially true when we are dealing with uses that extend into the realm of the cognitive as opposed to the simply physical. The basic idea is that the meanings of words is often not enough for the listener or reader to be able to properly interpret the cognitive intent of the speaker. Certainly the words play very important roles in many cases we need to go beyond the actual meanings of the words.
F. John opened the door.
G. The kick opened the door.
H. The key opened the door.
The first two of these are based on relations from the physical world and we can probably understand them in their letter meanings without any kind of pragmatic experience with specialized knowledge. This means that we do not necessarily need to know the situation very well in order to interpret the sentence. The last one, on the other hand, is based on an abstraction or an extension from the physical world. He itself is not actually opening the door, but we say that and it is understandable to others because we have knowledge of the world and what keys can do in the world.
I. His speech was the key to opening the election for him.
The example above we can see abstractions not just for prepositions but also for nouns along similar lines. This sentence even though we know all the different meanings of all the words is impossible to interpret without knowing situations in the world. Simply put, the use of this noun 'key' can only be interpreted within and through the world and our knowledge of it which is pragmatics.
10. How do the emergence of roles like agent and goal work to support the cognitive view of linguistic/cognitive development from perception?
These are cognitive abstractions from the world.
The interesting thing about these roles are that they play an important role in both generative and cognitive linguistics. In generative linguistics Chomsky has calmed to calling these theta roles (ɵ-roles) and they play very important role in his view of syntax. In the cognitive school these are generally referred to as semantic roles and they to play an important role in the model. For Chomsky each noun in the structure must have a particular theta role. Theta roles are given to announce from their governing verb. For cognitivists semantic roles play an important role in that they worked as intermediaries between the structure and its actual meaning. They are used for helping map abstractions from the world onto an abstract cognitive structure and as such are seen is being invaluable to the model. It is in the role as basic and universal abstractions where they have the power. The idea is that all languages have more or less the same semantic roles and the semantic roles work basically in similar ways from language to language as they come from the physical world. So, an agent is somebody who does something. A patient is the recipient of some sort of action. An experiencer someone or something which is experiencing an action. These are derived from our moving through and observing what occurs in the physical world.