Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Linguistics
- Code
- BBI-ANG17-342E.58
- Title
- Elective seminar in Linguistics: Topics in English Phonology - Theory and Analysis: Substance and Substance-Free Phonology
- Usual semester
- Autumn
- ECTS
- 5
- Language
- en
- Learning outcomes
- The course is a highly technical one specialising in distinctive features (taken to define the underlying/phonological representation of a segment/phoneme) and the content of these features.
- Course content
- With the help of phonological processes taken various languages, the course will offer a broad overview of the last hundred years' worth of thinking on the nature of distinctive features from the Prague School of functional oppositions to the modern conception of substance-free distinctive features. Some of the questions we will be exploring is how much phonetics discloses about phonology and what the phonetic realisations of a phonological feature can be. We know that phonetics contains reams of phonologically 'unnecessary' details, whereas phonology is about contrast only (at least traditionally). Consider the phonological opposition between /s/ vs /ʃ/ in English where the opposition is phonetically enhanced with [round], found on [ʃ], a feature no analysis would claim is part of the phonological make-up /ʃ/. There is thus the question of the phonological analyst between the phonetic and the phonological and their desire to set up the contrastive feature of a language. There is also their (philosophical) conception on what the intrinsic content of a feature should be. Are features thus rich in substance (with [voice] implying some degree of vibration of the vocal folds), substance impoverished (with GT 'glottal tension', a laryngeal dimension, implying neither 'voiced' nor 'voiceless') or substance-free (where features are just labels depleted of any substance and cater for a mnemonic anchor of an opposition).
- Assessment method
- There will be two tests based on the articles and the in-class discussions (administered on Canvas). There will be a major assignment at the end of the term based on a selection of topics. The assignments will be weighed with the two tests carrying 25% each, and the home paper 50%. The deadline of the home paper will be in the exam period.
- Bibliography
- Technical readings will be assigned on a weekly basis. Chabot, Alex (2022). On Substance and Substance-Free Phonology: Where We Are at and Where We Are Going. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 67(4): 429–43. Raimy, Eric (2021). Privativity and ternary phonological behavior. In Sabrina Bendjaballah, Ali Tifrit & Laurence Voeltzel (eds.) Perspectives on Element Theory. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 65–110. Scheer, Tobias (2022). 3 x Phonology. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 67(4): 444–99. doi: 10.1017/cnj.2022.22.