Today’s Plan

• What was this course about?

• Your Phonological Future

• The Phonological Future

What was this course about?

Phonology

The study of how sounds pattern in Language and languages

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)

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

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?

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

… 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

Your work is not done, though.

There is so much more joy/pain in Phonology

Real world data are much dirtier

LIGN 111 Phonology problems

We’re isolating sets of rules to make your life easier

• In reality, you’ll have more moving parts

• More rules, more interactions

• 

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

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”

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)

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

We’ve also neglected big parts of phonology

Prosodic and Metrical Phonology

• Prominent

• Stressful

  • Get it?!?

• Completely missing from LIGN 111

Signed Language Phonology

• Absolutely, 100% a thing

• A major component of signed language study

• Completely absent here

Phonology of Harmony

• We’ve touched on harmony issues, but it gets much more complex

• Blocking, Domains, directionality

• Nope. Not in 111.

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?”

(and much, much more!)

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

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’

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

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

… but there are other ways!

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”

• 

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

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

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

(We talk more about usage-based approaches in LIGN 120)

• … assuming it’s me or Gabi teaching it!

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?”

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

What is the future of Phonology, anyways?

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

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

The Future of the Field of Phonology starts today

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!

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!

… as a matter of fact …

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!

… because …

Phonology is absolutely crucial to getting linguistic work done

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

10 weeks ago, an optimistic man said…

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

Your final dataset for LIGN 111

In case you haven’t noticed…

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

• We are incredibly proud of you!

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

We very much hope we succeeded!

Thank you!