Phonology deals with the sound structures of languages. A linguist who focuses on this subfield is known as a phonologist.

A crucial precursor to phonology is phonetics. By studying phonetics, linguistics get to know the sounds of languages themselves, that is, how sounds are produced in the mouth, what the tongue does, what the glottis does, what the lips do, etc. There are many more sounds in any given language than any native (or non-native!) speaker can perceive and hear. Phoneticians seek to explore and describe these sounds scientifically. All phonologists need a solid grasp in at least the basic concrete facts of phonetics for their study of language to make sense.

Phonologists, however, are less interested in the sounds themselves and more interested in how the sounds form a system in a given language. In other words, how are those sounds structured into units? These units may or may not be audible to an external observer as a set in terms of their phonetic characteristics, but nonetheless might make up a real set conceptually and in terms of their distribution in language data. Below, using ordinary data from our own common-sense, personal knowledge of English, we will talk about how the “T” sound in English behaves a certain way. It is this level of imaginary structure, the phonemic or phonological level, that native speakers perceive most easily. Phonologists thus seek describe sounds accurately while honing in on some logical relationships between the sounds.

For a relatively simple example, let’s take a look at the English sound “T.” It’s represented by the letter  “T/t,” and is actually made up several different consonant realizations or “phones” (more audible to non-native speakers than to native speakers!). The “T” sound, at its most basic level, can be understood as a single phoneme (or abstract sound) with several possible allophones of it (or concrete sounds):

1. Top is pronounced as a voiceless alveolar stop with aspiration (a puff of air)
2. Stop is pronounced as a voiceless alveolar stop without aspiration (no puff of air)
3. Tot is pronounced as an unreleased (begun but not ended) voiceless alveolar stop, and is often simply reduced to a glottal gesture, at least in casual speech
4. Butter is pronounced as a voiced alveolar flap

None of these allophones or pronunciations of abstract English /t/ (written in slashes to designate the phonemic level) is more “t” or less “t,” at least not in English. For the phoneme to exist in its full state, we need all the allophones.

Another part of phonology is to go about describing in which cases (or “environments”) each allophone occurs and proving that “T” is actually unique from, say, “D.” To continue our with example–leaving out more data and an adequate phonological argument, since they are beyond the scope of this article–allophone 1 above appears at the very beginning of a word and in a stressed syllable, allophone 2 appears after /s/ even if the rest of the previous conditions are satisfied, allophone 3 appears at the end of a word, and allophone 4 appears between two vowels as long as the second isn’t stressed. To prove that the allophones of /T/ belong to a separate phoneme class as those of /D/, for instance, we notice that “tot” and “Todd” have different meanings and are distinguished phonemically only by /t/ vs. /d/. This proves that, in English, “t” and “d” are unique from each other or, in phonological jargon, “allophones of separate phonemes.”

We at Florida Linguistics hope you’ve enjoyed this short article and found it useful. The next article in the Subfields of Linguistics series will deal with morphology.

In a video that has since gone viral, a recent contestant on Wheel of Fortune was penalized for the G-dropping in her pronunciation of the correct answer “Seven Swans A-Swimming.” This should trouble linguists for 3 reasons.

First, the incident reveals the stigma against users of non-standard accent or dialect. Although a convention of standard American English does require that progressive aspect “I-N-G” verbs be pronounced with a special “NG” sound (called the “velar nasal” by linguists), no native speaker of English would claim he or she did not understand  the contestant’s answer. As far as spelling is concerned, it has long been established that English words may be spelled differently from how they are pronounced. When two native speakers pronounce words differently, this doesn’t change the spelling. Although there is of course a literary tradition to alter standard spelling to reflect different regional accents—in the novels of Mark Twain for instance—this practice really has no standard rules and is certainly optional. Otherwise teachers would have to count alternate spellings correct on tests depending on each student’s dialect. No teacher would ever attempt such a ridiculous plan.

In other words, if you go to NPR’s website, you will not read about a show called “Cah Talk.” As Gershwin put it, I say potato, you say “potahto,” but I only spelled it that way so you get the joke. Let’s call the whole thing off, and spell them both “potato.”

Maybe you’re thinking,  “At least he didn’t spell it ‘potatoe!’” Clever you. Let’s take a side note before getting to the second part of the Wheel of Fortune trouble.

If the video about Dan Quayle is to be believed, this spelling is tempting. But do you know why? Even though “potatoe” is of course wrong, the spelling interestingly enough happens to reflect a well-established pattern of sound change that languages go through in their development called “analogy.” The spelling with “e” in the singular could be analyzed as a back-formation from the plural form, in which the “e” fulfills no phonological purpose. It even touches on the grammatical issue of mass vs. count nouns.

The basic contradiction is this: I assume that the Wheel of Fortune judge would contend that if the answer were really “a-swimmin,” then it would have been spelled with an apostrophe in the game. But this is getting the facts backwards! As anyone who’s ever watched it knows, the point of Wheel of Fortune is to spell words, not pronounce them!!! Such stupidity is regularly held as up conventional wisdom in a linguistics-ignorant society. Meanwhile, the underlying contradictions go unnoticed.

The second way in which the Wheel of Fortune incident should be troubling to linguists is that it reveals a lack of understanding of the linguistic facts grounding the alternate pronunciation. I became familiar with the phenomenon of Appalachian A-Prefixation when I took my first Linguisitics class at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2004. Many dialects historically and today have been “G-dropping” for years. It turns out that Appalachian English, as one of the many, also has “G dropping.” But it is the only dialect I know of that still has A-Prefixation. This would suggest that the pronunciation “a-swimmin’” is not only not wrong, but actually preferable to the non-dropped version expected by the judge! Furthermore, although I’m using the term “dropping” as a shorthand in this blog post, the velar nasal phone is not an alveolar nasal with something added, and which, as suggested by the term, can be “dropped” to become an alveolar nasal again. What makes the difference possible for the two stops (yes, stops; yes, “nasals” are really nasalized stops/plosives!) is that the stoppage of air is located at a different place in the mouth, with the rest of the physical characteristics unchanged. Although also true that the “g” sound is also voiced and velar, strictly speaking, the difference should not be what linguists call “ordered.” It is only in the spelling that “NG” equals “N” followed by “G.”

Phonologically, it’s not that G-dropping dialects lack velar nasals entirely. The facts can be partially explained by invoking the concept of a word boundary. In Linguistics, a word, a syllable, and a morpheme are all types of units surrounded on the left and right by silent markers called boundaries. Thus “(a-)swimming” can be pronounced “(a-)swimmin’” because of a G-dropping process that is activated on word-final velar nasals, but only word-finally. But imagine for a second you’re a speaker of a G-dropping dialect (maybe you really are!). If I’m “Singin’ in the Rain”—with a dropped G—I’m not necessary “Sinnin’ in the Rain”— with two dropped Gs, one word-final, the other not (morpheme-final as well as syllable-initial and/or intervocalic, depending on your theoretical slant). This example (singing/sinning) is a minimal pair showing the functional load of the velar vs. alveolar nasal distinction. In fact, all so-called “G-droppers” would make the distinction between “singin’” and “sinnin’,” and between “sing” and “sin,” unless of course they’ve got a radical religious belief! If it were just about the boundary, than the contrast between “sing” and “sin” would not be possible. So finding an analysis is actually quite tricky (and may in fact underlie a paper I am not aware of). Just when does the G drop (i.e., the alveolar nasal phone is used as an allophone of the velar nasal phoneme)? For us linguists, the facts of non-standard varieties (i.e., “vernaculars”) are often more interesting than the facts of standard ones, which can be watered down and stripped of their personality.

Finally, the Wheel of Fortune incident exposes linguists for not having their knowledge known by the world at large. The N/NG issue is a basic phenomenon that every foundational “Intro to Language” survey course could cover. If the issue had been in another commonly-taught field, for instance history, I think members of the audience, other contestants, or perhaps the host himself would have spoken up in protest. Yet what actually happened was that the judge on “Wheel of Fortune,” in making his or her unilateral and spurious enforcement of a dubious interpretation of one contestant’s phonology, got away unscathed while members of the audience knew something wasn’t quite right. When I watch the video, I can feel their reaction. Their acquiescence following the ensuing confusion is revolting to me, but I do not blame them. I blame our whole society. One of the missions of this site is to spread linguistics from the ivory tower of large universities out to the world.

So those are some reasons why we as a community should be troubled: the stigma, the ignorance about language, and the fact that linguists need to do more to spread the message. It is not the woman in the show that pays the highest price for linguistic ignorance. It is us all as a society.

The Florida Linguistics Association has a vision for a day when linguistics has established itself as an essential part of the liberal arts curriculum. On this New Year’s day, a day of new beginnings and an idealistic hope for the future, John Lennon’s vision for the world comes to mind. Maybe spreading linguistics will not be so “easy if you try.” But since the ways we speak affect all of us so deeply, the FLA still hopes for a day when all people will be “living life in peace” with a basic knowledge of human language. Or, for that matter, “livin’.”

PS: For those of you that are wondering, I’m not personally a regular G-dropper, but I have been known to drop the occasional beat. For more on the “velar nasal” as a linguistic parameter of cross-linguistic phonology, check out the WALS entry here. For more on the prejudice and stigma associated with non-standard dialects, just keep your ears open and listen to the junk people talk or imply. To help with the effort to spread linguistics, make a contribution to the site by sending an email to the FLA at fla@floridalinguistics.com, or take a linguistics course at a college/university near you.

One of the things I love about linguistics is the fact that languages are different. Sometimes these differences can seem small and trivial, other times maddeningly frustrating, but most of the time, sort of just “there.”

Since I’m living in a Russian-speaking country, when talking to people about my work, translating the “FLA” or “Florida Linguistics Association” caused me to face a pretty big problem. And the problem was clearly in the realm of . . . morphology. Uh-oh. Has anyone found it since the last time I was trying to find mine?

In English, N-N (that’s “noun-noun”) compounds are pretty interesting:
– the head noun appears on the right
– the modifier noun appears on the left
– case marking doesn’t come into the picture
– there are some stress issues: to make a long story short, the stress usually falls to the left of the head noun
– the modifier noun appears in the singular, even for many nouns that normally exist only in the plural. This is evidenced by such forms as “tooth decay” “drug addiction” “pant leg” (but there are counterexamples to this generalization, like a few quirky nouns, as well as variation other varieties of English, for example “a drugs problem”.)

In Russian, N-N phrases are pretty standard:
– the head noun appears on the left in whatever case is needed
– the modifier noun appears on the right, “frozen” in the genitive case

But they can also be translated with the suffix “sk” (the same Slavic morpheme as Polish names in skiy), in which case
– the head noun appears on the right in whatever case is needed
– the modifier noun is Adjectivized / de-nominalized with a suffix — /sk/, /ov/,
/in/ etc.
– the modifier de-nominal Adj appears on the left
– the modifier de-nominal Adj agrees in number/gender/case with the head noun

In English, I came up with two parsings for FLA, both of which sound the same, but which imply a different Russian translation. Here are the pictures:

1)                                                        < = = >

The Russian version of this would be

asosiaci-a                Florid-sk-oj                lingvistik-i
Association-NOM.FEM    Florida-ADJ-GEN.FEM    Linguistics-GEN.FEM

Here’s the second version:

2)                                                         < = = >

The Russian version of this would be

Florid-sk-aja                    linguistich-esk-aja            asosiaci-a
Florida-ADJ-NOM.FEM        Linguistics-ADJ-NOM.FEM    association-NOM.FEM

Ah, the gray area! The inability to make a grammaticality judgement!
Any native Russian-speaking linguists out there that can give us your intuitions?

Until next time, as RuskyEd says — DAS VIDANYAH!!

PS http://ruskyed.com/

The Five Minute Linguist is an excellent book to introduce beginners or laypeople to topics of current interest in linguistics. Composed completely of short chapters on subjects like what the original language was, who speaks Italian, and  how children acquire grammar, the authors of the articles are often leaders in the subfields they

explain (for instance Mark Baker on grammar, and Peter Ladefoged–who wrote the essay on phonetics shortly before his passing). The essays are all short enough to be read during a morning bus ride, and can be read in any order. Each chapter ends with an “about the author” and suggestions for further reading, including other chapters in the book and web resources. Although probably not entirely sufficient for the only book used in an introductory course, The Five Minute Linguist makes a great companion text. While not a must read, if you read it, you will have a good understanding of what linguists study, and may even be reminded of some ideas you forgot about.

David Odden’s Introduction to Phonology text is an ok introduction to the field.  Strong points include problem sets with data from a wide variety of languages, approaches to phonology from the different schools of the past hundred years (phonemicist, generative phonology with features, and non-linear representation), and good layout and formatting.  Weaknesses include a bad first chapter on phonetics, obstinate use of APA at the expense of IPA throughout, inadequate motivation concerning changes in theoretical perspective, and omission of optimality theory.  Furthermore, the glossary is incomplete and the index was not well-updated for the second addition.  In conclusion, if your teacher is using this, you have to buy it, but if you can choose, try to get one that uses IPA.

If we asked people to brainstorm on what they think about when they hear the word “grammar,” I think we would get some interesting results. When the word “grammar” comes up in conversation, I’ve noticed that people I meet regularly confuse it with a few things, which I call “negative experiences with grammar.” From my experience, people’s associations of the word “grammar” fall into three categories.

First, grammar is misunderstood as a way to punctuate writing.

Second, grammar is misunderstood as a way to reformulate phrases and sentences in written prose from what sound natural in ordinary speech. Grammar is basically made up of ways to speak “correctly” as opposed to what’s natural. Natural speech, then, is by extension presumed to be wrong. But if you can banish what sounds natural, you will be using language in the right way, so they say.

Finally, for non-native speakers learning a new language, grammar is often thought to be a set of mysterious endings or sentence patterns that are out there in books and tables, but only vaguely understood. These patterns, especially word endings that don’t transfer 1-to-1 from their native language, are considered redundant and unneeded. By intermediate learners of languages, correct grammar is often seen as a waste of time, because it is not really necessary for communication. Nonetheless, the best students are still capable of memorizing this grammar, usually because it’s “like math” or “logical.”

The linguist’s conception of grammar is necessarily in conflict with all three of people’s negative experiences with grammar.

First of all, grammar cannot possibly have anything to do with punctuation, because language is primarily spoken, not written. Most languages do not have a writing system (and some have more than one writing system), and they are still full-fledged, healthy languages.

In regard to misconception number two, everyday speech is the natural life of a language, and conscious rules are forced and unnatural. Think about what these rules imply about how language really works. For every prescriptive rule of the form “don’t do X” or “always do Y,” the reason for the rule is that people do do X, or aren’t really too keen on doing Y. Therefore, the grammar of the linguist and grammar of the schoolteacher are necessarily in conflict.
Now we come to number three—foreign language learners often have such little interaction with native speakers or native speaker communities that language becomes too abstract. Foreign languages are thus often reduced to mathematical systems that can be mastered silently at home and in private. “Grammar” of this type can be graded easily by non-experts, as many foreign language teachers have but a mediocre grasp of the language they’re teaching, and possibly no real experience living in a community where that language is spoken. For communication, foreign language “grammar” is quite unrealistically presented and not always useful.

For linguists, grammar might be defined as “the set of intuitions that native speakers have about what sentences sound good and what sentences don’t sound good.” These are called “grammaticality judgments,” and they make up a large body of linguistic data. Explaining these judgments is the goal of syntax, one of the traditional subfields of modern language science. Grammar for a modern linguist is something that is acquired unconsciously by children, because humans are hard-wired for language.

Grammar is also the source of the creativity of native speakers. The sentences we say are not memorized. The rules are not known consciously, so the rules governing language cannot be put into a book. Any book (even a linguistics book).

For me, the disconnect between “grammar” as the world views it and what little knowledge I have of the real grammars of language makes me feel a little uneasy. Actually, it feels a little like Gnosticism, like I’ve got some secret knowledge that the mainstream doesn’t have. I am embarrassed that my beliefs, which are quite traditional and accepted within my own field, make me sound like an insane person to so-called language experts outside of linguistics.

A few facts muddy the waters and cloud native speakers’ judgments. Trying to be correct, accommodation, variation, and sentences that are just hard to judge end up complicating a task that should otherwise be simple to do.

When a linguist gives a native speaker a sentence, negative experience number two often comes into play. Instead of answering with a yes or no, the native speaker responds with “I don’t know – what’s correct?” Another version of this: when asked a question about language, we remember some rule that we heard somewhere, and try to implement that rule on the fly. Sometimes we’re not quite sure how that rule was supposed to work, but we figure that we might as well try to follow it. Now that someone’s asking, it’s really important to “get it right.”

Another problem with getting clear judgments is that speakers of a language often like to cut their conversation partner some slack, even to the extent of starting to talk like their friends. This is called “accommodation theory.” When native speakers interact with non-native speakers, many of us have a tendency to accommodate our speech, consciously or unconsciously, to the way the other person is talking. If they ask us if something is right, we may cut them some slack, or even lose track of our own native grammar, because we’re too busy molding our speech to non-native patterns.

Another problem complicating grammar is that some statements are okay in one variety of a language, but not in another. So if in America we say, “When I got there, she hadn’t yet gotten my e-mail”, and in some other English-speaking country they say “When I arrived, she hadn’t yet got my e-mail”, native speakers of the first variety should feel confident saying that the former version sounds better to them than the latter. But this is not always the case, because our conscious knowledge about other varieties of the same “language” clouds our judgment of what our unconscious, grammatical knowledge really is.

Finally, some statements really are unclear. They may be marginally correct, or we may be able to contrive some strange situation in which we would expect the sentence to be uttered. In cases like this, it’s hard to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down response.

Unfortunately, things don’t look too good for the linguistic/scientific understanding of grammar. People continue to learn foreign languages where grammar is idealized in tables for solo memorization. This grammar is drilled until students are bored to tears and forget why they wanted to learn the language in the first place. We don’t use our commas correctly, which is supposedly a really bad thing. Traditional educational establishments, like some teachers of high school English, college writing teachers, and experts in non-language fields, continue to propagate old prescriptive ideas about language without questioning them or justifying their out-of-date rules. Publishing houses put out reference books that contribute to an understanding of language as static, right/wrong (with the “right” version in their books), and memorized (not creative).

If we want to make progress, maybe we should just forget everything we’ve ever heard about grammar. Then maybe we’ll realize that if we just talk normally, we’ve known how to say what we wanted to all along.