J. Goldsmith – The Handbook of Phonological Theory (Second edition, 2014)

Автор: J. Goldsmith
Название книги: The Handbook of Phonological Theory (Second edition)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Лингвистика
Страницы: 968
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

The Handbook of Phonological Theory, second edition offers an innovative and detailed examination of recent developments in phonology, and the implications of these within linguistic theory and related disciplines.

Revised from the ground-up for the second edition, the book is comprised almost entirely of newly-written and previously unpublished chapters
Addresses the important questions in the field including learnability, phonological interfaces, tone, and variation, and assesses the findings and accomplishments in these domains
Brings together a renowned and international contributor team
Offers new and unique reflections on the advances in phonological theory since publication of the first edition in 1995
Along with the first edition, still in publication, it forms the most complete and current overview of the subject in print

This new volume on phonological theory is in some respects a continuation of
the Handbook of Phonological Theory published by Blackwell in 1995. The present
book was several years in the making, and refl ects both the changes that the fi eld
has gone through in the years since the fi rst handbook was written, and a shift
in the precise character of the questions we hope to see answered in a book such
as this. As you will see in the chapters that follow, we have asked each author to
take a step back from the research that has been published over the last decade
in each subfi eld in phonology, and to ask what the broader questions are that
have been the focus of investigators over a longer period of time. Having identifi
ed the long-standing questions, the authors were then asked to pass judgment
– as best they could – on the degree to which the fi eld had succeeded in providing
answers to these questions.
In this way, our handbook takes on a perspective that is different from many
others in linguistics. We have asked our authors to set as their primary goal to
provide some grounds for determining the degree to which phonology – as a
whole, and as a set of subdisciplines – displays a cumulative character, which
is to say, succeeds in asking questions that are both interesting and useful in
some respects, and then – just as importantly! – answering them. In particular,
we asked our authors to avoid as much as possible adopting the stance of the
scholar who predicts where the fi eld will, or should, go in the next fi ve to ten
years, and what the important open questions are. While there certainly is a place
for such gazing into a well-focused crystal ball, we felt that the present handbook
was not that place.
Comparing the present handbook to the one that was produced in 1995, we
seem to fi nd, too, that the fi eld has expanded: it now includes a good deal more
content and emphasis on phonetics, on variation, and on computational approaches.
In reality, the growth is more a matter of perspective than anything else: studies on
phonetics, variation, and computation that were of interest to phonologists have
existed for a long time, but the perception is now much stronger that this work
is not outside the fi eld of phonology (though of interest to some phonologists), as it is a real and integral part of the fi eld itself. The broader range of the questions
covered by the authors in this volume is testament to that change.
If we were to point to the greatest single difference between the work in the
two volumes, it would have to be the considerable replacement of the analytic
tools of phonological derivations within a generative framework with those
optimality theories, utilizing ranked constraints from a universal inventory of
violable phonological constraints. The fi rst chapter in this volume, by David
Odden, provides an illuminating overview of the nature of the questions which
have been explored, with the goal of understanding the essential difference between
these two approaches.
In Chapter 2, Eric Bakoviä revisits the topic of opacity and examines its role
in distinguishing ordered versus parallel phonological derivations. He demonstrates
that the range of opaque relations between underlying and surface forms
does not partition neatly into “counterfeeding” and “counterbleeding” classes
and moreover that there are cases which fi t Kiparsky’s seminal defi nition of
opacity that cannot be generated by ordered derivations.
Changes in analytic tools are often accompanied by shifts in perspectives.
Age-old problems are given a fresh look while new puzzles come about, as novel
theoretical tools are tested. In this respect, the emphasis on constraint interaction
and monostratalism has certainly left an undeletable mark on how one thinks
about the relationship between the morphological and phonological components
of grammar. In Chapter 3, Sharon Inkelas surveys the pros and cons of a monostratal
interpretation of the morphology-phonology interface, and details the many
ways in which morphological processes can be sensitive to phonological information
and vice versa, highlighting properties that any theory of the phonologymorphology
interface must take into account.
In Chapter 4, Stuart Davis offers an overview of the development of moraic
phonology and provides a survey of a wide range of linguistic phenomena where
the mora plays an important role, including thorny issues such as the existence
of moraic onsets and the replacement of moraic quantity with phonetically-defi ned
weight sensitivity in language.
Matthew Gordon provides a broad overview of stress systems, including
quantity insensitive systems and quantity sensitive systems, in Chapter 5. Gordon
provides an account of what constitutes “weight” in various quantity-sensitive
systems and discusses the relationship between word-level and phrase-level stress.
The chapter also presents an in-depth comparison of foot-based and grid-based
representations of stress and discusses their ramifi cations for models of stress.
John Goldsmith presents in Chapter 6 a synoptic overview of the ways of
understanding the syllable that have played a role in phonological thinking over
the last hundred years, emphasizing the ways – often complementary, and not
always consistent – in which the different conceptions of the syllable have emerged
and developed in discussions in the literature. The two most appealing approaches
have based on waves of sonority, on the one hand, and constituent structure as
developed by mid-century syntacticians, on the other. A few phonological theories have tried to jettison the syllable, but rarely with any lasting success, and a successful
synthesis of the best of what has been learned still awaits us.
Larry M. Hyman has studied tone languages – mostly, but not exclusively,
African tone languages – in great depth since the 1960s, and in Chapter 7, he
offers the reader a rich account of many of the properties of tone languages that
have emerged in studies over the past several decades. He asks what we have
learned about how tone is different from other aspects of spoken language, and
how it can nonetheless shed a great deal of light on the way in which phonological
information is organized in natural language.
Sharon Rose and Rachel Walker provide a thorough overview of harmony systems
that includes vowel harmony, consonant harmony, and vowel-consonant harmony
in Chapter 8. They provide an account of the triggers and targets of harmony in
the case of continuous sequences and when harmony acts at a distance. For the
latter, they provide an analysis of segments that block harmony when they intervene
between trigger and target and those that are transparent to harmony. They
identify a broad dichotomy between consonant harmony on one hand and vowel
harmony – including vowel-consonant harmony – on the other that is framed in
terms of blocking and transparent segments and the functional grounding that
provides insight into why consonant harmony does not, in general, admit transparency,
while harmony with vowels does. Finally, they discuss a range of fundamental
issues, including the domain of harmony, directionality, and locality.
The notion of contrast reduction has been central to many major developments
in phonological theories. Yu’s chapter, which is an expanded version of an article
titled “Mergers and Neutralization,” that appeared in the Companion to Phonology
(Wiley-Blackwell 2011), provides an overview of the range of contrast reduction
phenomena in the world’s languages and past theories that try to explain the
typological tendencies. Yu places a particular focus on the problems raised by
covert contrasts (i.e. incomplete neutralization and near mergers). He questions
the reliability of the traditional methods of phonological investigation (see also
Ladd’s chapter) and argues for the need to evaluate the presence and absence of
a phonological contrast at a more nuanced level.
While it is undeniable that languages are products of history, the issue of how
phonological explanation should take into account historical factors remains a
contentious one. Hansson’s chapter, which originally appeared in the journal
Language and Linguistics Compass, reviews an wide array of theoretical stances that
phonologists have taken over the years, ranging from strictly modular approaches
to the more integrationalist. Hansson shows that this controversy largely stems
from questions about the nature of sound change and what models of sound
change reveal about the nature of phonological knowledge.
D. Robert Ladd’s chapter on the role of phonetics in phonology is a good
example of how the thematic questions at the center of phonological discussions
have evolved over the last 15 years. The time-depth of his discussion, involving
scholars working over almost all of the twentieth century, is considerably deeper
than that found in any of the chapters in the 1995 volume, and Ladd explicitly draws together the views that Trubetzkoy developed in the 1930s with those at
the heart of classical generative phonology and those that scholars today are
developing, often under the infl uence of far richer computational resources than
was imaginable even 25 years ago. The easy assumptions that phonetic reality
can be modeled with a well-designed symbolic representation, such as that produced
by the International Phonetic Association, have been widely challenged,
and Ladd asks what alternative empirical accounts are available to us now for
characterizing the nature of phonetic reality.
As noted earlier, a major change since the last edition of this handbook has
been the rise in prominence of phonetic, variationist, and computational approaches
in phonological investigation. A clear refl ection of this is in the greater willingness
on the part of many phonologists to engage data sources that have not played
a large role in early theoretical developments. In their contribution, Ernestus and
Baayen review fi ndings of recent corpus-based studies of sound patterns and
highlight important lessons to be learned from such studies. The appearance of
what might in former times be thought of as “messy data” in the phonological
discourse has invited renewed discussion on the abstractness of phonological
knowledge, which the authors integrate by comparing the merits of abstractionbased
vs. exemplar-based models of phonology.
In Chapter 13, Andries Coetzee and Joe Pater discuss several theoretical
approaches to variation in phonology. It is fair to say that the emergence of widespread
interest in variation among theoretical phonologists is one of the more
signifi cant changes in the fi eld at large since the publication of the 1995 Handbook
of Phonology (which did not contain a chapter on variation). Coetzee and Pater
review a range of proposals in which variation is taken to illuminate the core
phonological grammar rather than obscure it. Instead of regarding variation as
a performance-related epiphenomenon that must be factored out in order to
characterize the phonological grammar, they focus on understanding the locus
(or loci) of variation in the grammar and the empirical consequences of various
assumptions in this regard.
Lisa Selkirk has been doing infl uential work on the interface between phonology
and other components of the grammar for over three decades. In Chapter 14, she
discusses the interface between phonology and syntax in terms of the relationship
between syntactic constituents and prosodic constituents. She presents a thorough
account of the way that prosodic constituent domains for phonological and phonetic
phenomena at the sentence level are related to syntactic constituency.
A domain where interests in phonetic and phonological investigations have
converged in recent years is the area of intonational research. In their chapter on
intonation, which is a slightly revised version of their contribution in the Handbook
of Phonetic Sciences (edited by Hardcastle, Laver, and Gibbon, 2009), Beckman and
Venditti review the development and advances of experimental intonational
research and highlight their contributions to the understanding of intonational
phonology and prosodic typology.
In Chapter 16, Harry van der Hulst presents an overview of work on governmentand
dependency-based phonology, which explores the consequences for phonological theory of developing phonological representations that incorporate in an essential
way formal asymmetrical relationships between abstract elements. “Asymmetrical”
here refers to the important differences between what are called the
head and the dependent, connected by a relation of dependency. Van der Hulst
reviews recent work in this area, and notes respects in which government phonology
has brought out parallels involving relations between elements in syntax
and in phonology.
Katherine Demuth discusses in Chapter 17 the ways in which contemporary
phonological theory has been refl ected in the research concerns of a large part of
the language acquisition community. Among the themes whose importance has
grown over the last two decades are the relevance of surface-oriented phonological
patterns, of prosodic patterns at both the syllable and foot level, of markedness
and underspecifi cation, and frequency. At the same time, conclusions can be
drawn that are more robust in light of the wider range of languages that have
been studied by acquisition researchers.
In Chapter 18, John Coleman guides the reader through the developments over
the last 50 years which have infl uenced phonological modeling, bringing out the
often only tacit connections between computational conceptions and phonological
analyses, such as those employing fi nite-state methods, purely declarative formalisms,
or techniques based on neural networks.
As phonologists rely more and more heavily on experimental methodologies,
the question of the psychological status of phonological constructs becomes ever
more important in the analyst’s mind. Goldrick (Chapter 19) explores the notion
of psychological realism in phonological inquiries, highlighting the need to
differentiate at least three levels of analysis: functional, algorithmic, and neural.
Using well-formedness judgments as a case study, he emphasizes the need to
articulate in greater specifi city the functional architecture of language processing
in the context of interpreting experimental results.
Adam Albright and Bruce Hayes present an account of phonological learning
in Chapter 20. They focus on formal systems designed to model the path by which
children acquire the phonological grammar of their fi rst language and evaluate
the adequacy of the systems in terms of their ability to elucidate what is known
about linguistic competence in three specifi c areas. The areas that they give special
attention to are phonotactic knowledge, phonological alternations, and patterns
of variation. They argue that any system capable of mimicking human performance
in these areas – including the mistakes – will have reverse-engineered key aspects
of the phonology of natural language in a way that enriches our understanding
of both theoretical phonology and the broad character of observed phonological
phenomena.