LIGN 111 - Will Styler

<h1>Linguistics 111: Phonology</h1>
<h3>Dr. Will Styler - Winter 2019</h3>

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### Today's Plan

- What was this course about?

- Your Phonological Future

- The Phonological Future

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# What was this course about?

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## Phonology

The study of how sounds pattern in Language and languages

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### Within-Language Phonological Questions

- What sounds differentiate words? (Phonemic Analysis)
    - ... and what do speakers hear as being “the same sound”?

- How do speakers tend to group sounds together? (Natural Classes)

- How do sounds change when combined together? (Phonological Alternations)

- What combinations are “legal” in the language? (Phonotactics)

- How are syllables formed and what kinds of syllables does the language prefer? (Syllable Structure)

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### You've got this now

- You see how sounds can carry contrast, or just vary contextually

- You now understand that classes and features can often be more valuable than segments

- You know some of the rules (like sonority and syllable structures) that make sounds more or less 'legal'

- ... and you can cope with the weirdest of syllable problems

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### Phonological Theory Questions

- What patterns of sound patterns are more and less common around the world?

- How should we model the sound patterns we see in language?

- Are we using rules that transform 'underlying' sounds into one another?

- Are we choosing a form among many which does the fewest things we don't like?

- How do these various approaches handle *real data from real languages*?

- Do they predict all the things that really happen?

- Do they predict crazy things that *never* happen?

- How do they account for exceptions and other weird data?

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### Yep, you're on this too

- You know what kinds of rules are common, and which ones seem more weird

- You know the advantages of rule-based approaches

- You've felt the pain of rules that don't predict everything

- ... and of rules that do predict **everything**

- ... and you've seen your perfect analysis shatter in light of a handful of exceptions

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### ... and we've gone beyond that

- We've seen data that *nobody's* really happy about

- We've seen some alternative approaches to handling these data

- We've seen that all the regularity in the world shatters when you're in the field

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### Your work is not done, though.

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# There is *so* much more joy/pain in Phonology

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## Real world data are *much* dirtier

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### LIGN 111 Phonology problems

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### We're isolating sets of rules to make your life easier

- In reality, you'll have more moving parts

- More rules, more interactions

- <img class="r-stretch wide" src="phonology/hebrew_derivations.jpg" alt="$txt">

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### We're giving you a necessary and sufficient amount of data

- We're giving you data in digestible chunks

- In reality, you'll have *all* of the data

- Step 1 is to identify the forms which explain the rules

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### We're cleaning the data

- "Hmm, that epenthesis isn't understandable in this subset of data"

- "These four forms turn this from one rule to six.  Let's leave those out"

- "... Yeah, let's pretend that's not a long vowel"

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### You're not dealing with all the other issues in Linguistics

- You're told what sounds actually are on the surface (Phonetics)

- You're told what the words mean (Semantics)

- You know the morphemes involved, and that they're not secretly different forms (Morphology)

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### You're given problem sets which we know you can handle

- Languages have no such mercy

- Any given language has the potential to force advances in theoretical phonology

- ... and even individual forms can force us to rethink how phonology should work

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## We've also neglected big parts of phonology

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### Prosodic and Metrical Phonology

- Prominent

- Stressful

- Get it?!?

- Completely missing from LIGN 111

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### Signed Language Phonology

- Absolutely, 100% a thing

- A major component of signed language study

- Completely absent here

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### Phonology of Harmony

- We've touched on harmony issues, but it gets *much* more complex

- Blocking, Domains, directionality

- Nope.  Not in 111.

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### Historical Phonology

- "How do sounds change as languages change?"

- "How do contrasts develop and disappear over time?"

- "Wait, how the f\*\*\* did Afrikaans get tone?"

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(and much, much more!)

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## We haven't even talked about some of the other approaches to phonology!

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### We don't have a "best" theory of phonology

- We're teaching you the best one to teach undergrads

- ... but there are many people working on approaches they each feel are 'best'

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### We've talked about rules

- There's a UR which contains the unpredictable stuff

- Rules *derive* the surface form from it using predictable processes

- Complexity comes from multiple interacting rules, or from abstract URs

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### We've talked about constraints

- There's a UR which contains the unpredictable stuff

- We know what this language *doesn't* like, and how bad it is to do each of those things

- Let's pick the least-worst form!

- Complexity comes from constraint choice and ordering, as well as GEN

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... but there are other ways!

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### Government Phonology

- "Well, we're pretty good at syntax.  Why not do phonology like we do Syntax?"

- "Screw features, let's just derive everything from six primitives"

- <img class="r-stretch wide" src="phonology/government_cats.jpg" alt="$txt">

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### Computational Phonological Modeling

- "There's still some variation in the data. How can we model that with constraints?"

- Let's compute the 'best' solution using *actual language data*

- Plug a large corpus of data in with some constraints to a statistical model (like Maximum Entropy)

- You'll get rankings of the constraints, and probabilities of each form

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### Usage-Based Phonology

- All we have is the surface forms

- We store every word we've ever heard, as whole words

- Phonemes aren't a thing

- The frequency of hearing a given form determines the correct answer

- Wugs are handled by analogy

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### Why usage-based phonology?

- Goodbye URs and Abstractions!

- Memories, Mammaries, and Artillery

- Complexity comes from analogy

- ... and the fact that it's worthless to describe a language's phonological system in a grammar
    
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### (We talk more about usage-based approaches in LIGN 120)

- ... assuming it's me or Gabi teaching it!

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### Laboratory Phonology

- "I wonder if these phonological questions can be addressed by experimental phonetic study?"

- "Are my nasal vowels actually nasal?"

- "Is this a devoiced /d/, or just a /t/?"

- "Do we see evidence of constraints vs. rules in this experimental paradigm?"

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### We're not quite sure if LabPhon == Phonology

- Or whether it's just a trojan horse from Phonetics

- 😈

- ... but it is absolutely a thing, and now more than ever, phonetics and phonology are tight

- ... and LabPhon is changing the nature of the field

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# What is the future of Phonology, anyways?

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### The Battle for the Soul of Phonology

- Some people want phonology to stay what it has historically been

- ... and focus on rigorous description of the data

- Some people want phonology to become an experimental discipline

- ... and continue the phonetics/phonology love-fest

- Some people want phonology to become a mathematical discipline

- ... and treat phonology like any other data-modeling problem
    
- Some people just need to work with languages

- ... and they'll do whatever it takes to get the patterns described
    
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### Much of what we do in Modern Phonology was developed within the last 50 years

- The people who revolutionized the field were sitting in a classroom like this 60 years ago!

- ... and many argue the field is ripe for a new revolution

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## The Future of the Field of Phonology starts today

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### Some of you will go on to be actual professional Phonologists

- You will help the field to advance

- You will help new tools, theories, and technologies to be developed

- You will help guide the field into the future

- **You will work with phonology for the rest of your career!**

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### Some of you will run screaming, as fast as you can, from Phonology

- Phonology is *hard*.

- Many argue it's the hardest undergrad linguistics class
    
    - Some argue it's the hardest linguistic subfield
    
- It's also often super abstract

- ... and that level of abstraction doesn't sit well with everybody
    
- The problems you want to solve might not be phonological...

- ... but guess what!
    
- **You too will work with phonology for the rest of your career!**

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*... as a matter of fact ...*

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### **All of you will have to deal with phonology for the rest of your careers**

- There is no place to run

- There is no place to hide

- Phonology will find you.

- LIGN 120: Phonology Strikes Back!

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... because ...

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# Phonology is absolutely *crucial* to getting linguistic work done

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(So, you best be able to deal with it!)

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## 10 weeks ago, an optimistic man said...

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### In 10 weeks, you will look at a phonological problem and...

- Know that it's a phonological problem

- Identify what's changing or unexpected

- Understand how to start looking at and characterizing it

- Use tools from this class to break it down

- Describe the pattern, and form a coherent analysis

- Describe the pattern, and form an *elegant* analysis

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### Your final dataset for LIGN 111

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.tg th{font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-weight:normal;padding:10px 5px;border-style:solid;border-width:1px;overflow:hidden;word-break:normal;border-color:black;}
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<table class="tg">
  <tr>
    <th class="tg-fymr">Singular</th>
    <th class="tg-fymr">Gloss</th>
    <th class="tg-fymr">Plural</th>
    <th class="tg-fymr">Gloss</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td class="tg-0lax">[fat]</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">'glass'</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">[avat]</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">'glasses'</td>
  </tr>
   <tr>
    <td class="tg-0lax">[tas]</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">'cat'</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">[adas]</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">'cats'</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td class="tg-0lax">[sap]</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">'card'</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">[azap]</td>
    <td class="tg-0lax">'cards'</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td class="tg-xldj">[pu]</td>
    <td class="tg-0pky">'trashcan'</td>
    <td class="tg-0pky">[abu]</td>
    <td class="tg-xldj">'trashcans'</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td class="tg-xldj">[kop]</td>
    <td class="tg-0pky">'phone'</td>
    <td class="tg-0pky">[agop]</td>
    <td class="tg-xldj">'phones'</td>
  </tr>
</table>
</center>

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### In case you haven't noticed...

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### You're now rolling your eyes and speeding through data that would have wrecked you in January

- We are *incredibly* proud of you!

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### This class had two main goals

- 1) To give you enough phonological knowledge to move past many phonological problems

- 2) To show you why phonology is an interesting and worthwhile field to spend your life in

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# We very much hope we succeeded!

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<huge>Thank you!</huge>