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A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology

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Published/Copyright: December 14, 2006
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Theoretical Linguistics
From the journal Theoretical Linguistics Volume 32 Issue 2

Abstract

1. An overview of Evolutionary Phonology

1.1. Explaining sound patterns

Phonology is the study of sound patterns of the world's languages. In all spoken languages, we find sound patterns characterizing the composition of words and phrases. These patterns include overall properties of contrastive sound inventories (e.g. vowel inventories, consonant inventories, tone inventories), as well as patterns determining the distribution of sounds or contrastive features of sounds (stress, tone, length, voicing, place of articulation, etc.), and their variable realization in different contexts (alternations). A speaker's implicit knowledge of these patterns is often evident in their extension to novel items and in experiments probing phonological well-formedness. This implicit knowledge – its content, formalization, and representation, – is the central focus of modern theoretical phonology, including generative phonology and many of its derivatives (natural phonology, government phonology, dependency phonology, optimality theory).

Published Online: 2006-12-14
Published in Print: 2006-11-01

© Walter de Gruyter

Articles in the same Issue

  1. A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology
  2. Comments on Juliette Blevins, “A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology”
  3. An evolutionary perspective on stop inventories
  4. Transmissibility and the role of the phonological component
  5. On the use of Evolutionary Phonology for phonological theory
  6. On the typology of final laryngeal neutralization: Evolutionary Phonology and laryngeal realism
  7. The Amphichronic Program vs. Evolutionary Phonology
  8. Rejecting the phonetics/phonology split
  9. Reply to commentaries
https://doi.org/10.1515/TL.2006.009

Articles in the same Issue

  1. A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology
  2. Comments on Juliette Blevins, “A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology”
  3. An evolutionary perspective on stop inventories
  4. Transmissibility and the role of the phonological component
  5. On the use of Evolutionary Phonology for phonological theory
  6. On the typology of final laryngeal neutralization: Evolutionary Phonology and laryngeal realism
  7. The Amphichronic Program vs. Evolutionary Phonology
  8. Rejecting the phonetics/phonology split
  9. Reply to commentaries
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