Lin 515 - Phonology
This Introduction to Phonology course is designed to do two things:
Survey some basic phonological data: How do speech sounds work, pattern, and interact across the worlds languages? Why cant bnick or fnaishl be a word of English? Why does your Japanese friend think you get a Big Mac at Makudonarudo? What properties do sound patterns share across every language in the world, and in what general ways do they differ? Much of this course will focus on patterns within and among sound segments, but later we will talk more about larger phonological units like syllables and words.
Teach you to analyze phonological data like a scientist. Throughout the course we will look at lots of languages. In each case, you will look at some data, see patterns in that data, describe them as carefully as you can, use a theory to capture those patterns, and then assess how well the theory works – or even compare two theories abilities to capture the same data. In the first two thirds of the course, the theory we will use is one of phonological rules. In the later weeks, we will entertain a different theory that uses ranked constraints.