Phonology

Phonology is a subtopic within linguistics that focuses on the study of sounds and sound patterns within a language and across multiple languages. Specifically, phonology concentrates on how sounds and sound patterns generate meaning capable of being expressed and understood. Experts in the scholarly study of phonology are known as phonologists, while professionals who provide practical training in phonology to laypeople are usually called phonological pathologists or speech pathologists.

Phonology is often discussed in tandem with phonetics, a related subtopic within linguistics. Consequently, the terms “phonology” and “phonetics” are often incorrectly used interchangeably despite important differences in the respective disciplines. Phonetics deals exclusively with the study of the sounds that people make when they speak, whereas phonology expands the scope of phonetics to describe the techniques and systems used within and across languages to organize and classify sounds and sound patterns.

Brief History

Scholars have studied the nature and characteristics of human language for many centuries, including documented examples of such endeavors dating back to the classical civilizations of Ancient Greece. However, the modern, organized study of phonology did not arise until linguistics emerged as a distinctive area of academic inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notably, the word “phonology” entered the English language before phonology evolved into a specialized subfield of linguistics. The earliest known usage of the word dates to 1798, when it first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Like phonology itself, phonology’s parent field of linguistics has centuries of academic precedent that antecede its arrival as an individually recognized area of study. Experts widely regard the Swiss scholar and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure as the founder of modern linguistics. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Saussure pioneered the realignment of intellectual interest in the study of language from its historical focus on how a language evolves over time to viewing language as an ordered system capable of being studied in a self-contained manner at any given time without respect to its evolutionary history. Saussure’s ideas were published after his 1913 death, with his students convening to curate a detailed explanation of his approach to linguistics from notes they made while attending his university lectures. His model quickly became highly influential within academic circles, and Saussure’s understanding of language as a structured collection of random sounds given meaning and order by an accompanying system of rules and exceptions was widely adopted by the academic community.

With the foundations of the emerging field of linguistics in place, scholars began to study the individual elements that comprise language in increasing detail. Modern approaches to phonetics and phonology first appeared during this time, with experts crediting the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen as the academic who first articulated the difference between phonetics and phonology in his seminal 1924 work, The Philosophy of Grammar. In the book, Jespersen exposed the limitations of legacy approaches to the study of language and forwarded updated, more precise definitions for many of the emerging academic terms used in the field of linguistics. Among these definitions was a clearly delineated distinction between the study of the sounds used in a language (phonetics) and the systems used to classify, arrange, and understand those sounds and sound systems (phonology).

During the 1920s and 1930s, linguistics experts began to discuss and debate the emerging tenets and pillars of phonology in academic journals and scholarly publications. Some early phonologists adopted the viewpoint that the ordered structure of speech sounds was a psychological byproduct of human cognition, whereas others argued that such ordered structure arose from observable external influences specific to the population in which a language evolves. The latter perspective, which came to be known as “structuralist phonemics,” dominated the fields of phonetics and phonology from the mid-1920s until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when scholars proposed revolutionary new models that ushered phonology into its more mature and complex modern phase.

Beginning in 1959, linguistics experts conducting detailed studies of the Russian language began to endorse the view that sounds and sound patterns were the result of cognitive abstraction rather than specific, observable factors. Related arguments, laid out in convincing detail by Latvian-born linguist Morris Halle (1923–2018), resulted in a shift in scholarly consensus away from structuralist phonemics and toward Halle’s ideas during the early 1960s. After heated intellectual debate, Halle’s model—known as “generative phonology”—emerged as the new widely accepted standard by about 1965.

A defining aspect of generative phonology arises from Halle’s belief that more was demanded of phonology than simply identifying the sounds and sound-forms that he collectively called “representations.” For Halle, a system of language-specific rules for when and how to use specific representations was missing from phonology. Though groundbreaking and contentious at the time, this idea grew into a fundamental core principle of phonology and continues to form the basis of its contemporary study. For this reason, Halle is often cited as modern phonology’s founding figure.

Beyond establishing modern phonology’s seminal theoretical features, the generative school of phonologists also amalgamated the previously distinct field of morphophonology into the broader phonological field. Morphophonology is a specialized branch of linguistics that concentrates on morphemes, which are the smallest units that carry meaning in language, and their role in forming words. Examples of English morphemes include prefixes such as un- and suffixes such as -ed and -ing.

Overview

From its foundations in generative phonology, the present-day field of phonology has branched into two principal areas: segmental phonology and suprasegmental phonology (also known as prosody). Segmental phonology concentrates on the study of language as defined by its smallest segments, which are comprised of the sounds and sound patterns native to the field of phonetics. However, instead of focusing on the formal properties of these sounds and sound patterns as phonetics does, segmental phonology analyzes the various functions these segments occupy within a language and the full set of ways in which they are used by a language. Suprasegmental phonology maintains an even more precise focus of inquiry, examining aspects of language, sound, and pronunciation that exist outside of segmentation, either because they simultaneously spread across multiple sounds, sound patterns, or segments within a word or unit of speech. Examples include language features such as intonation and syllabic emphasis.

Contemporary theoretical models that endeavor to describe the notoriously vague and hazy distinctions between phonetics and phonology often use a standard representation known as the “speech chain” to assign various aspects of the language-use process to one discipline or the other. A simplified version of the speech chain divides the act of language use into five distinct stages: the first stage occurs in the speaker’s mind, when they decide what to say and how to say it. The second stage occurs in the speaker’s mouth, when they form the words that they have decided to utter. The third stage occurs when the sound generated by the speaker travels through the air. The fourth stage occurs in the listener’s ear, when the sounds made by the speaker are heard by the listener. The fifth and final stage occurs in the listener’s mind, when they interpret the sounds detected by their ear. The speech chain model assigns the first and fifth stages to phonology, while the second stage belongs to articulatory phonetics, the third belongs to acoustic phonetics, and the fourth belongs to auditory phonetics. According to this paradigm, the main difference between phonetics and phonology is that phonetics deals exclusively with the physical properties of spoken sound, whereas phonology instead focuses on the character and nature of the cognitive and psychological processes involved in assigning meaning to those sounds. Modern phonology has also evolved to include its own distinct set of subfields and theoretical models, with key examples including autosegmental phonology, government phonology, and optimality theory.

Autosegmental phonology, which emerged in the mid-1970s, endorses a nonlinear view of phonology that endeavors to explain suprasegmental language features such as tone of voice. These features, termed “autosegments,” are considered independent units of language and can simultaneously impact multiple consonant and vowel sounds within words and across multiple words. Government phonology, also known as the phonological theory of government, represents an evolved system of using a universal structure known as “parameter settings” to account for the syntactic differences across languages on the level of the sounds and sound-forms defined by Halle as representations. Optimality theory is a model used to describe the general structure and characteristics of grammar. It was developed in the early 1990s and takes the novel approach as viewing the phenomenon of human language not as a system of prescriptive rules, but rather as a set of restrictive constraints that speakers must navigate and satisfy to make utterances that carry meaning.

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