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Phonology: Overview

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562 Phonology: Overview
Phonology: Overview
R Wiese, Philipps University, Marburg, Germany
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Phonology – What Is It About?
Phonology is that part of language which comprises the
systematic and functional properties of sound in lan-
guage. The term ‘phonology’ is also used, with the
ambiguity also found with other terms used for the
description of languages, for the study of those system-
atic features of sound in language. In this sense, it refers
to a subdiscipline of linguistics. It was the first such
subdiscipline in which the view of language as an object
with particular structural properties was developed
successfully. Phonology seeks to discover those system-
atic properties in the domain of sound structure, and
find the regularities and principles behind it both
for individual languages and for language in general.
More recently, phonology has become considerably
diversified and has found a number of applications.
The emphasis on systematicity in the definition
above derives from the observation that behind the
infinitely varying properties of each token of speech
there is an identifiable set of invariant, recurring,
more abstract properties. The hypothesis that such a
phonological system exists is largely due to Saussure
(see Saussure, 1916) and to the phonologists of the
early structuralist school, both in Europe (the Prague
school and the British school) and in the United States
(American structuralism); see the survey by Anderson
(1985).
Phonology, from its beginnings, has stood in a close,
but sometimes strained, relation to the other science of
linguistic sounds, phonetics. Phonetics studies the con-
crete, physical features of sound in language, often
called speech. As the function of phonology is to
make linguistic items, which are represented by rather
abstract symbols, pronounceable and understandable,
it is intimately related to phonetics. But while phonet-
ics is interested in the concrete, continuously varying
features of articulation, sound transmission (acous-
tics), and auditory perception, the subject of phonolo-
gy is thought to be a set of discrete, symbolic categories
which belong to the cognitive, and not the physical,
domain. This distinction can be interpreted either as a
rather strict and principled one, or as one which is
gradual and of less importance.
The Categories of Phonology
The Phoneme
The first invariant of the categories identified in
phonology was the phoneme. The discovery of the
phoneme, the smallest unit of sound which causes a
form to differ in meaning from other forms, can justly
be identified as the origin of phonology. While the
groundwork for phonology was laid in the analysis
of many ancient and modern languages, around the
beginning of the 20th century the work by Ferdinand
de Saussure (Saussure, 1916), Jan Baudouin de
Courtenay (Baudouin de Courtenay, 1972), and Franz
Boas (Boas, 1889) was crucial for the formulation
of the phonemic analysis in a stricter sense. This was
followed in the first half of the 20th century by sever-
al important formulations of phonological theory,
notably by Edward Sapir (Sapir, 1921), Leonard
Bloomfield (Bloomfield, 1933), Roman Jakobson
(Jakobson, 1939) and Nikolay Trubetzkoy (Trubetzkoy,
1967). A unit of sound is a phoneme if it func-
tions to distinguish lexical items from each other
in terms of meaning, and if it cannot be broken up
any further in a way that other lexical units emerge.
The German (Standard German) word mein ([maI:n]
‘my’), for example, clearly is a different word from
nein ([naI:n] ‘no’). At the same time, neither [m] nor
[n] can be split up in such a way that other words of
German appear. Together with similar comparisons
relating [m] and [n] to other segments of German,
the so-called minimal pair just presented constitutes
evidence that /m/ and /n/ are phonemes of this
language.
A phoneme therefore is a contrastive structural unit
of language, and is related to, but not identical with, a
concrete sound. Phonemes within a language form
phonemic systems, by means of the contrasts between
phonemes. The nasals /m, n, N/, for example, form
part of the phoneme system of German, and contrast
systematically with an otherwise similar subsystem,
that of the voiceless consonants /p, t, k/. Seen ab-
stractly, a phoneme is nothing but the set of such
contrasts; seen more concretely, a phoneme is a class
of related sounds. Phonology also aims at the study
of the properties of phonemic systems, and has estab-
lished many patterns and principles which hold for
such systems; see, in particular, Maddieson (1984).
The conception of phonemes as objects in human cog-
nition is largely due to Sapir (1933), who argued that
speakers must have mental representations of sounds,
and that these mental objects cannot be identical to the
concrete realizations of such phonemes.
The Phonological Features
The phoneme turns out to be an important, but not
the only, category needed for the phonological de-
scription of languages. Most importantly, phonemes
can be shown to function in groups which share

identifiable properties. This observation, largely due
to Trubetzkoy and Jakobson, led to the formulation
of a theory of distinctive features. Such features de-
scribe the classes of phonemes by assigning the same
feature to all members of a class. At the same time,
features define sounds (phonemes or not) and express
their composite nature. Thus, a sound [p] may be
assigned the feature [labial], on the grounds that clo-
sure of the lips is a crucial ingredient of this sound.
The description of this sound then includes the fea-
ture [labial], and the class of labial consonants (and
perhaps vowels such as [u]) is defined as the set of
sounds bearing this feature.
Finally, the features can also be seen as the set of
atomic units from which all larger units of sound are
constructed, in all languages. In this function, the set
of phonological features is part of the cognitive equip-
ment which allows human beings to use language. In
phonological theory, since the work by Jakobson et al.
(1952), the hypothesis has been proposed that there is
indeed a small set of features from which all sound
segments can be built up. This feature set thus con-
stitutes something like the set of atoms from which
all larger units derive. Several sets of features have
been proposed since then, most influentially that in
Chomsky and Halle (1968).
Phonological Processes
Sounds, whether phonemes or not, often relate
to each other in systematic ways. A first type of
relation is that between a phoneme and its (possibly
several) realizations. This relation can be described
by means of rules which specify precisely in which
way a phoneme is modified under specific circum-
stances, such as influence from its right-hand or left-
hand neighbors. For example, a vowel will often
be nasalized if standing before a nasal consonant.
This approach was most thoroughly proposed by
Chomsky and Halle (1968) in a rule-based phonolog-
ical theory. In this theory, processes are not only those
which describe the relation between a phoneme
and its realizations, but also those which relate pho-
nemes of several connected word forms. In this view,
a rule is also called upon to describe the relation
between the sounds in, for example, relate with final
/t/ and relation with final /s/ in the same morpheme,
but before the suffix -ion. In other theories, processes
of this type (often riddled by exceptions in one direc-
tion or other) are placed in a separate component of
grammar called morphophonology. Thirdly, phono-
logical processes can also be observed if language is
looked at diachronically. Thus, the changes leading
from the Middle English vowel system including /i:/,
as in wife or mice, to the Modern English vowel
system with the diphthong /VI/ in the corresponding
Phonology: Overview 563
items can be described as the result of a set of phono-
logical processes, in this case the so-called Great
Vowel Shift.
Generative phonology in the version proposed by
Chomsky and Halle (1968) and in other works was
strongly process oriented in giving rules a central
place in the model. Phonological rules are based on
features in the sense introduced above and apply
to underlying forms (abstract phonemes) to derive
surface forms. More recent theories, in particular
declarative phonology and optimality theory, diverge
from this view. Processes are now modeled not by
means of feature-changing rules, but as the surface
result of static constraints which put different
demands on sounds under different conditions.
Prosody and Its Categories
Phonology in many recent conceptions also is a theo-
ry of phonological grouping, that is, of units of a size
larger than the phoneme. The size of these groupings
ranges from the small subphonemic unit (such as
the atomic features) to the most comprehensive one,
often called the utterance. These units are usually
assumed to be hierarchically related to each other.
The most widely used of the prosodic units is the
syllable. It usually consists of a vowel and some flank-
ing consonants, which may or may not be present.
The principles of syllable structure largely determine
what sequences of sounds are permissible in a lan-
guage. Furthermore, the syllable is an important
domain for phonological processes. Syllables often
come in two types, stressed and unstressed, as in the
English word Piccadilly [%pIk@"dIlI], which consists of
two stressed and two unstressed syllables, resulting in
an alternating sequence of stressed and unstressed
syllables. Groupings consisting of a stressed syllable
plus any unstressed syllables are identified as
members of a further prosodic category, called the
foot. (Other languages display other types of feet;
see Hayes, 1995 for a typology of feet.)
The example just given also illustrates that stress
(also called accent) is a phonological phenomenon. It
can even be phonemic in the sense of being contras-
tive, as in English ı́mport (n.) with initial stress versus
impórt (v.) with final stress. Such phenomena of stress
can be observed in units of several sizes. The domain
of word stress is the unit called the prosodic word
or phonological word, and the domain of stress in
larger units is the phonological or prosodic phrase.
Thus, prosodic words and prosodic phrases are
other units of phonology. This hierarchy extends up-
wards to the intonational phrase, the domain of into-
national patterns. These units also serve as the
domains of phonological restrictions or processes.
The phonological word, for example, is the
 564 Phonology: Overview
domain for vowel harmony in many languages, as in
Hungarian or Turkish.
A further prosodic phenomenon is that of tone.
Tone is the lexically contrastive use of pitch move-
ment, as in Standard Chinese (Mandarin Chinese),
where one and the same syllable can be combined
with several (four) such pitch levels and movements,
with the result that most of the combinations between
segmental syllables and tones are different lexical
items. The phenomena of stress and tone and their
analysis in phonology were to a large extent respon-
sible for developments in phonological theory which
led beyond the view that a phonological representa-
tion is nothing but a string of segments (with segments
built up from elementary features). Tone and stress
turn out to be inherently nonsegmental in the sense
that they relate to units both larger and smaller than
an individual sound segment. There may be more
than one tone per segment, and there may be one
tone relating to more than one segment, the tone
sometimes spanning a domain as large as a whole
word. These observations led to a new theory of
representations in phonology, called autosegmental
phonology.
Phonology in Its Relation to Other Parts of
Language
The relation of phonology to phonetics has been dis-
cussed in the section ‘Phonology – What Is It About?’
above. As the phonology of a language is the system-
atic use of phonetically given material, the interface
between phonology and phonetics is crucial in any
phonological theory. A phonological system being
part of the structural system of language, which
includes at least morphology, syntax, and semantics,
its relation to these components of language needs to
be discussed as well. In most structuralist conceptions
of language and grammar, several levels of linguistic
analysis must be distinguished. While the phonologi-
cal level of analysis contains at least a phonemic and
an allophonic level, phonology is also closely related
to morphology, simply because morphemes are signs
relating a meaning with a phonological form. Further-
more, the concatenation of morphemes often causes
the changes identified as morphophonological above.
Finally, there are often prosodic requirements on both
simplex and complex words, requiring a further close
interaction between phonology and morphology.
Phonology relates to syntax mostly through the for-
mation of phonological phrases and intonational
phrases. By determining (at least in part) how such
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prosodic units are formed, syntax indirectly influ-
ences the placement of phrasal stress and intonation
contours. As for semantics, the main connection to
phonology is again through intonation. Intonation is
constrained by phonology (through the principles
governing the assignment of tonal features within
intonational phrases), syntax, and semantics. The
result of such constraints deriving from syntax, se-
mantics, and phonology is often called information
structure, a particular packaging and ordering of
information within a sentence.
See also: Autosegmental Phonology; Chinese (Mandarin):
Phonology; Declarative Approaches to Phonology; Foot;
Hungarian: Phonology; Intonation; Kimatuumbi: Phonolo-
gy; Phonemic Analysis; Phonological Phrase; Phonologi-
cal Words; Phonology: Optimality Theory; Phonology–
Phonetics Interface; Prosodic Morphology; Structuralist
Phonology: Prague School; Syllabic Constituents; Sylla-
ble: Phonology; Tone: Phonology.
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