Publisher Description

Generative Phonology: Description and Theory provides a basic understanding of the fundamental concepts of generative phonology and the applications of these concepts in further study of phonological structure. This book is composed of 10 chapters and begins with a survey of phonology in the overall model of generative grammar and introduces the principles of phonetics to. The subsequent chapters introduce the fundamental concept of a phonological rule that relates an underlying representation to a phonetic representation and this concept is applied to the analysis of morphophonemic alternation. These topics are followed by a presentation of phonological sketches of four diverse languages in terms of rules relating underlying and phonetic representations, as well as the major corpus-internal principles and techniques of phonological analysis. The discussion then shifts to the theoretical aspects of phonology, the various degrees of abstractness, and the proposals to limit the divergence between underlying and phonetic representation. Other chapters deal with some of the issues revolving around the representation of sounds and the various hypotheses as to how phonological rules apply to convert the underlying representation to the phonetic representation, particularly the kinds of considerations that motivate rule-ordering statements. The last chapters explore the major notational devices commonly employed in the formulation of phonological rules and the role of syntactic and lexical information in controlling the application of phonological rules. This book is intended primarily for linguistics and phonologists.

Generative phonology has many adherents, and not a few critics, but surprisingly few good expositors. François Dell provides here both a general introduction and a detailed illustration of the operation of the theory in practice, introducing the main concepts of phonology and its place in the grammar of a language. The approach is in the tradition of Chomsky and Halle, emphasizing the interactions between syntax, morphology and phonology, and aiming at the discovery of general principles which shape the sound patterns of all languages. He then applies these concepts to particular case studies, on the maxim that the best way to understand a system of this kind is to use it. This was first published as Part I of Les règles et les sons (Hermann, 1973).

This volume is the first to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive history of phonology from the earliest known examples of phonological thinking, through the rise of phonology as a field in the twentieth century, and up to the most recent advances. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I offers an account of writing systems along with chapters exploring the great ancient and medieval intellectual traditions of phonological thought that form the foundation of later thinking and continue to enrich phonological theory. Chapters in Part II describe the important schools and individuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who shaped phonology as an organized scientific field. Part III examines mid-twentieth century developments in phonology in the Soviet Union, Northern and Western Europe, and North America; it continues with precursors to generative grammar, and culminates in a chapter on Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English (SPE). Part IV then shows how phonological theorists responded to SPE with respect to derivations, representations, and phonology-morphology interaction. Theories discussed include Dependency Phonology, Government Phonology, Constraint-and-Repair theories, and Optimality Theory. The part ends with a chapter on the study of variation. Finally, chapters in Part V look at new methods and approaches, covering phonetic explanation, corpora and phonological analysis, probabilistic phonology, computational modelling, models of phonological learning, and the evolution of phonology. This in-depth exploration of the history of phonology provides new perspectives on where phonology has been and sheds light on where it could go next.

This volume is devoted to a major chapter in the history of linguistics in the United States, the period from the 1930s to the 1980s, and focuses primarily on the transition from (post-Bloomfieldian) structural linguistics to early generative grammar. The first three chapters in the book discuss the rise of structuralism in the 1930s; the interplay between American and European structuralism; and the publication of Joos's Readings in Linguistics in 1957. Later chapters explore the beginnings of generative grammar and the reaction to it from structural linguists; how generativists made their ideas more widely known; the response to generativism in Europe; and the resistance to the new theory by leading structuralists, which continued into the 1980s. The final chapter demonstrates that contrary to what has often been claimed, generative grammarians were not in fact organizationally dominant in the field in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.

This book makes an important contribution to the expanding body of work in generative phonology which aims to reduce the number of traditionally recognized melodic categories in order to achieve a greater degree of restrictiveness. By analyzing data from a large number of different languages, Nasukawa establishes a clear affinity between nasality and voicing, and demonstrates the advantages of treating these two properties as different phonetic manifestations of a single nasal-voice category. The choice of whether to interpret this category as voicing or nasality is determined by the active or inactive status of a complement tier; when active, this complement tier enhances the acoustic image of its head category and is interpreted as voicing. This study deepens our understanding of the typological relation between nasality and voicing, and sheds new light on a number of related agreement phenomena such as nasal harmony, postnasal voicing assimilation, voiced-obstruent voicing assimilation and spontaneous prenasalisation.