Phonology In The Twentieth Century

The original (1985) edition of this work attempted to cover the main lines of development of phonological theory from the end of the 19th century through the early 1980s. Much work of importance, both theoretical and historiographic, has appeared in subsequent years, and the present edition tries to bring the story up to the end of the 20th century, as the title promised. This has involved an overall editing of the text, in the process correcting some errors of fact and interpretation, as well as the addition of new material and many new references.

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.

Rather than the standard American story of an increasingly triumphant march of scientific inquiry towards structural phonology, Women, Language and Linguistics reveals linguistics where its purpose was communication; the appeal of languages lay in their diversity; and the authority of language lay in its speakers and writers. Julia S Falk explores the vital part which women have played in preserving a linguistics based on the reality and experience of language; this book finally brings to light a neglected perspective for those working in linguistics and the history of linguistics.

In this book, D. Robert Ladd focuses on problems with the one-dimensional idealization of language on which much linguistic theory is based. Strings of sequentially-ordered elements play an important role as theoretical abstractions in both phonology and syntax. Yet many well-known phonological phenomena (such as vowel harmony, ablaut morphology, and pitch features) are problematic for this one-dimensional idealization, and many attempts (such as autosegmental phonology) have been made to allow for these troublesome characteristics in our theories. The book deals with diverse aspects of these problematical non-sequential phenomena. The five main chapters cover distinctive features and autosegments, systematic phonetics, the definition of 'prosody', aspects of vocal paralinguistic communication and 'gradience', and duality of patterning. Each chapter reviews a wide range of relevant literature, generally going back to the beginnings of modern linguistics in the early twentieth century, and all of them can usefully be read as free-standing synthetic overviews of the issues they discuss. The final chapter suggests that phonological structure, sequential or otherwise, can be seen as a special case of the segmentation of continuous action into discrete events, and that research on this general topic within cognitive psychology is relevant to phonological theory. Professor Ladd's unique work makes a fundamental contribution to phonology and phonetics and to linguistic theory more generally. His book will interest all theoretical linguists and cognitive scientists concerned with understanding the relation between phonological representations and the speech signal.

This collection of papers from Eighth Conference on Laboratory Phonology (held in New Haven, CT) explores what laboratory data that can tell us about the nature of speakers' phonological competence and how they acquire it, and outlines models of the human phonological capacity that can meet the challenge of formalizing that competence. The window on the phonological capacity is broadened by including, for the first time in the Laboratory Phonology series, work on signed languages and papers that explicitly compare signed and spoken phonologies. A major focus, cutting across signed and spoken phonologies, is that phonological competence must include both qualitative (or categorical) and quantitative (or variable) knowledge. Theoretical approaches represented in the collection for accommodating these types of knowledge include modularity, dynamical grammars, and probabilistic grammars. A second major focus is on the acquisition of this knowledge. Here the papers pursue the consequences for acquisition of taking into account the richness and variability of the adult systems that provide input to the child. The final focus is on how phonological knowledge guides speech production. Data and models address the question of how speech gestures interact with one another locally (through articulatory constraints and syllable-level organization) and how they interact with the prosodic structure of an utterance. The twenty-six papers in the collection include invited contributions from Diane Brentari, David Corina, David Perlmutter, D. Robert Ladd, Diamandis Gafos, Marilyn Vihman, Shelley Velleman, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, and Dani Byrd.