The Emergence of Distinctive Features

The Emergence of Distinctive Features PDF Author: Jeff Mielke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199207917
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
"The Emergence of Distinctive Features will be of essential interest to phonologists and typologists, as well as to syntacticians, cognitive scientists, and scholars outside linguistics interested in the nature of language and its acquisition."--BOOK JACKET.

The Emergence of Distinctive Features

The Emergence of Distinctive Features PDF Author: Jeff Mielke
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Typology and
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book makes a fundamental contribution to phonology, linguistic typology, and the nature of the human language faculty. Distinctive features in phonology distinguish one meaningful sound from another. Since the mid-twentieth century they have been seen as a set characterizing all possible phonological distinctions and as an integral part of Universal Grammar, the innate language faculty underlying successive versions of Chomskyan generative theory. The usefulness of distinctive features in phonological analysis is uncontroversial, but the supposition that features are innate and universal rather than learned and language-specific has never, until now, been systematically tested. In his pioneering account Jeff Mielke presents the results of a crosslinguistic survey of natural classes of distinctive features covering almost six hundred of the world's languages drawn from a variety of different families. He shows that no theory is able to characterize more than 71 percent of classes, and further that current theories, deployed either singly or collectively, do not predict the range of classes that occur and recur. He reveals the existence of apparently unnatural classes in many languages. Even without these findings, he argues, there are reasons to doubt whether distinctive features are innate: for example, distinctive features used in signed languages are different from those in spoken languages, even though deafness is generally not hereditary. The author explains the grouping of sounds into classes and concludes by offering a unified account of what previously have been considered to be natural and unnatural classes. The data on which the analysis is based are freely available in a program downloadable from the publisher's web site.

The Emergence of Distinctive Features

The Emergence of Distinctive Features PDF Author: Jeff Mielke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199207917
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The Emergence of Distinctive Features will be of essential interest to phonologists and typologists, as well as to syntacticians, cognitive scientists, and scholars outside linguistics interested in the nature of language and its acquisition."--BOOK JACKET.

Distinctive Feature Theory

Distinctive Feature Theory PDF Author: T. Alan Hall
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110886677
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This volume consists of nine articles dealing with topics in distinctive feature theory in various typologically diverse languages, including Acehnese, Afrikaans, Basque, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Navajo, Portuguese, Tahltan, Terena, Tswana, Tuvan, and Zoque. The subjects dealt with in the book include feature geometry, underspecification (in rule-based and in Opti-mality Theoretic treatments) and the phonetic implementation of phonological features. Other topics include laryngeal features (e.g. [voice], [spread glottis], [nasal]), and place features for consonants and vowels. The volume will be of interest to all linguists and advanced students of linguistics working on feature theory and/or the phonetics-phonology interface.

Phonological Markedness and Distinctive Features

Phonological Markedness and Distinctive Features PDF Author: Arthur Brakel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Where Do Phonological Features Come From?

Where Do Phonological Features Come From? PDF Author: George N. Clements
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027208239
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This volume offers a timely reconsideration of the function, content, and origin of phonological features, in a set of papers that is theoretically diverse yet thematically strongly coherent. Most of the papers were originally presented at the International Conference "Where Do Features Come From?" held at the Sorbonne University, Paris, October 4-5, 2007. Several invited papers are included as well. The articles discuss issues concerning the mental status of distinctive features, their role in speech production and perception, the relation they bear to measurable physical properties in the articulatory and acoustic/auditory domains, and their role in language development. Multiple disciplinary perspectives are explored, including those of general linguistics, phonetic and speech sciences, and language acquisition. The larger goal was to address current issues in feature theory and to take a step towards synthesizing recent advances in order to present a current "state of the art" of the field.

Evolutionary Phonology

Evolutionary Phonology PDF Author: Juliette Blevins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139451464
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Evolutionary Phonology is a theory of sound patterns which synthesizes results in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonological theory. In this book, Juliette Blevins explores the nature of sounds patterns and sound change in human language over the past 7000–8000 years, the time depth for which the comparative method is reasonably reliable. This book presents an approach to the problem of how genetically unrelated languages, from families as far apart as Native American, Australian Aboriginal, Austronesian and Indo-European, can often show similar sound patterns, and also tackles the converse problem of why there are notable exceptions to most of the patterns that are often regarded as universal tendencies or constraints. It argues that in both cases, a formal model of sound change that integrates phonetic variation and patterns of misperception can account for attested sound systems without reference to markedness or naturalness within the synchronic grammar.

The Emergence of Distinctive Features

The Emergence of Distinctive Features PDF Author: Jeff Mielke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199207916
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"The Emergence of Distinctive Features will be of essential interest to phonologists and typologists, as well as to syntacticians, cognitive scientists, and scholars outside linguistics interested in the nature of language and its acquisition."--BOOK JACKET.

Preliminaries to Speech Analysis

Preliminaries to Speech Analysis PDF Author: Roman Jakobson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Speech
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description


The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology

The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology PDF Author: Paul de Lacy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462059
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
Phonology - the study of how the sounds of speech are represented in our minds - is one of the core areas of linguistic theory, and is central to the study of human language. This handbook brings together the world's leading experts in phonology to present the most comprehensive and detailed overview of the field. Focusing on research and the most influential theories, the authors discuss each of the central issues in phonological theory, explore a variety of empirical phenomena, and show how phonology interacts with other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology, phonetics, and language acquisition. Providing a one-stop guide to every aspect of this important field, The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology will serve as an invaluable source of readings for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, an informative overview for linguists and a useful starting point for anyone beginning phonological research.

Workbook for the Identification of Phonological Processes

Workbook for the Identification of Phonological Processes PDF Author: Robert J. Lowe
Publisher: Pro-Ed
ISBN: 9780890796467
Category : Articulation disorders
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description