English Phonology course outline (2007-2008)
2 Oct : Class 1 Phoneme theory
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What is phonology? What does a phonological system imply? The relationship between abstract phonological entities and phonetic realisations;
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The work of early phonologists in developing phoneme theory: ‘concrete’, ‘mentalist’ and ‘structuralist’ phonemes; the role of opposition and contrast in phoneme theory; the structuralist view and its drawbacks;
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The phoneme in child language; Phoneme theory and applied linguistics; categorical perception.
9 Oct Class 2 Phonemic systems
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How phonemic systems vary; universals; neutralisation, the archiphoneme
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Classifying English vowels and consonants; Vowel quality and length; Different theoretical accounts of the English phonemic system; Abstract and phonetic specification
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Implications for accounts of accent diversification and sound change, implications for L2 learners.
16 Oct Class 3 Structure in phonology
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Phonotactics; defining the syllable; sonority; loanwords and structural constraints; English consonants and syllable structure; Cross-linguistic similarities and differences;
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Structure above the syllable: morphemes, words, phrases;
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Relevance for L2 learners; Segmentation in language processing.
23 Oct Class 4 Phonological processes
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Citation forms and continuous speech, contextual variation, simplification; Domains and the application of processes;
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Phonological processes: consonant assimilation, coarticulation, consonant weakening, vowel reduction, elision of vowels and consonants, resyllabification;
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Relevance for foreign learners in production and comprehension; phonological processes and language comprehension.
30 Oct Class 5 Theoretical developments 1: Features and autosegments
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Beyond the phoneme: Why and how? Biuniqueness, invariance and linearity; Distinctive features, redundancy matrices, naturalness and markedness, underlying and surface forms, rewrite rules;
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Beyond the feature: Nonlinear vs. linear approaches; Redundancy and underspecification;
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Implications for representations in language processing.
6 Nov Class 6 Theoretical developments 2: Constraints
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Beyond rules: Universals and markedness, rules and exceptions, rule ordering, economy, arbitrariness, variation;
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Abstractness of lexical representations and phonotactics in a constraint-based framework: underlying and surface forms, Richness of the Base, Faithfulness, loanword adaptation;
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OT and language acquisition;
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Some current issues in phonology: Opacity, Phonetics vs. phonology.
13 Nov Class 7 English prosody 1: Stress, accent, rhythm
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Phonetic correlates of suprasegmental phenomena; stressed and unstressed syllables; stress-shift; the relation between lexical stress and accent
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Nonlinear representations of stress in metrical phonology, foot structure, light and heavy syllables, quantity;
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Rhythm: rhythm classes; the phonetics and phonology of rhythm;
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Prosodic typology; the functions of stress, rhythm and prosodic grouping; the mapping between segmental and suprasegmental structure; prosody and language processing.
20 Nov Class 8 English prosody 2: Intonation and its functions
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English intonation in the British tradition: Organisation into tone groups/contours, structure of the tune, tune types, placement of tonic/focus and the nucleus;
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Tones and Autosegmental Theory, Autosegmental-Metrical accounts of intonation, AM in OT
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Intonation and meaning, linguistic and paralinguistic features, biological codes;
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Intonation and child language.
27 Nov Class 9a Sounds and spelling in English
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The principles underlying English orthography; relations between phonemes and graphemes;
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Morpho-phonological and morpho-lexical relationships as represented in the orthography – a ‘mixed system’ serving widely varying accents.
27 Nov Class 9b L2 phonology and teaching English pronunciation
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Some issues in second language phonology;
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A brief guide to some basic principles of teaching pronunciation at different levels with different goals.
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