Phonology definition

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 2:04 pm

Phonology

Phonology (from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]: φωνή, phōnḗ, "voice, sound" and λόγος, lógos,
"word, speech, subject of discussion") is, broadly speaking, the
subdiscipline of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
concerned with "the sounds of language".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
That is, the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], or the
field of linguistics studying this use.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
In more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function,
behaviour and organization of sounds as linguistic items".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Just as a language has [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], it also
has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area
of study, the term typically describes [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] either beneath the word
(e.g., [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], onset and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
articulatory feature, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], etc.) or to units at all levels of
language that are thought to structure sound for conveying [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

It is viewed as the subfield
of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] that
deals with the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] systems
of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
Whereas [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is about
the physical production, acoustic transmission and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of the sounds of
speech,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across
languages to encode meaning. The term "phonology" was used in the
linguistics of a greater part of the 20th century as a cover term uniting
phonemics and phonetics. Current phonology can interface with disciplines such
as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
resulting in specific areas like articulatory or laboratory phonology.

Overview

An important part of
traditional forms of phonology has been studying which sounds can be grouped
into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. For
example, in English, the [p] sound in pot is [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (pronounced [pʰ]), while the word- and
syllable-final [p] in soup is not aspirated (indeed, it might be
realized as a glottal stop). However, English speakers intuitively treat both
sounds as variations ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) of the same phonological category, that is, of
the phoneme /p/. Traditionally, it would be argued that if a word-initial
aspirated [p] were interchanged with the word-final unaspirated [p] in soup,
they would still be perceived by native speakers of English as "the
same" /p/. (However, speech perception findings now put this theory in
doubt.) Although some sort of "sameness" of these two sounds holds in
English, it is not universal and may be absent in other languages. For example,
in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
aspiration and non-aspiration differentiates phonemes: that is, there are word
pairs that differ only in this feature (there are minimal
pairs differing only in aspiration).

In addition to the minimal
units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]),
phonology studies how sounds alternate, i.e. replace one another in different
forms of the same morpheme ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]), as well as, e.g., [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] structure, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

The principles of
phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign
languages, even though the sub-lexical units are not instantiated as speech
sounds. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] because they are designed to serve as
general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. On the other hand, it
must be noted, it is difficult to analyze phonologically a language one does
not speak, and most phonological analysis takes place with recourse to phonetic
information.

Representing phonemes

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The
vowels of modern (Standard) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and (Israeli) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] from the
phonemic point of view. Note the intersection of the two circles—the
distinction between short a, i and u is made by both
speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid articulation of short vowels, while Hebrew
lacks the distinction of vowel length.

The writing
systems of some languages are based on the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of having one letter (or
combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can
correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly read anything that is
written. However in English, different spellings can be used for the same
phoneme (e.g., rude and food have the same vowel sounds), and the same letter
(or combination of letters) can represent different phonemes (e.g., the
"th" consonant sounds of thin and this are different).
In order to avoid this confusion based on orthography, phonologists represent
phonemes by writing them between two slashes: " / / ".
On the other hand, reference to variations of phonemes or attempts at
representing actual speech sounds are usually enclosed by square brackets:
" [ ] ". While the letters between slashes may be
based on spelling conventions, the letters between square brackets are usually
the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or some other phonetic transcription system. Additionally,
angled brackets " ⟨ ⟩ " can be used to isolate the
graphemes of an alphabetic writing system.

by **Admin** Wed Apr 06, 2011 2:47 pm

Nice Work

Phonology definition

Phonology definition

Re: Phonology definition