PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS PAPER A SEMINAR TOPICS
AND READING LIST
These graduate seminars/classes are for students preparing for Paper
A (Phonetics and Phonology Section A). Titles in red are
reprinted in J. A. Goldsmith
(ed.) (1999) Phonological Theory: The Essential
Readings, and are referred to by chapter
thus: [G12] is chapter 12.
In advance of each week's meeting, please choose one
paper that you will prepare to summarise (orally, with a short handout
if you like) for the benefit of the other students. And read as many of
all the other papers as you can.
The essay titles are illustrative. If you choose to write any of
these essays as practice for Paper A, I will be happy to read them and
give you feedback.
Topic 1: Segmentation
Essay
Question: "To what extent is it reasonable to regard speech as
consisting of a sequence of discrete segments?"
Foundations
- Jakobson, R. (1949) On the identification of phonemic entities.
In his Selected Writings,
vol. 1, 418-425.
- Martinet, A. (1949) Phonology
as Functional Phonetics. Publications of the Philological
Society XV.
Problems
- Firth, J. R. (1948) Sounds and Prosodies. Transactions of the Philological Society
1948, as well as widely anthologized. E.g. in Firth's Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951.
- Goldsmith, J. (1976) An
overview of Autosegmental Phonology. [G8] A revised version of
chapter 1 of Goldsmith's (1976) PhD thesis, Autosegmental Phonology.
A recent
contribution
- Caramazza, A., D. Chialant, R. Capasso and G. Micelli (2000)
Separable processing of consonants and vowels. Nature 403, 428-430. Available in
electronic format through the Bodleian website.
Topic 2: Classification
Reading
- Handbook of the International
Phonetic Association.
- On vowels: D. Jones (1918 etc) An
outline of English Phonetics, chapter VIII.
- Pike, K. L. (1943) Phonetics. Chapters
V and VII.
- N. Chomsky and M. Halle (1968) The
Sound Pattern of English, chapter 7.
- M. Lindau (1978) Vowel Features. Language 54 (3), 541-563. JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/412786.pdf
Essay Question: Compare and
constrast the approaches to the classification of EITHER vowels OR
consonants in the IPA vs. generative phonology.
Topic 3: Syllables and moras
- Pike, K. L. and E. V. Pike
(1947) Immediate constituents of Mazateco syllables. [G16] International
Journal of American Linguistics 13,
78-91.
- Fudge, E. C. (1969) Syllables. [G19]
Journal of Linguistics 5, 253-286.
- Selkirk, E.
O. (1982) The syllable. [G17] In
H. van der Hulst and N. Smith, eds. The
Structure of Phonological Representations, Part II. Dordrecht:
Foris.
- Clements, G. N. and S. J. Keyser
(1983) (Extract from) CV Phonology: A generative
theory of the syllable. [G10] Chapter
1 and sections 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.6 of the 1983 book.
- Hayes, B. (1995) Metrical
Stress Theory, section 3.9.
Development
- Hayes, B. (1989) Compensatory lengthening
in moraic phonology. [G18] Linguistic Inquiry 20,
253-306.
- Ito, J. (1989) A prosodic theory of epenthesis. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 7, 217-259.
English
- Myers, S. (1987) Vowel shortening in English. Natural
Language
and Linguistic Theory 5, 485-518.
- Borowsky, T. (1989) Structure preservation and the syllable coda
in English. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7,
145-166.
Psycholinguistic evidence for syllable structure
- Meyer, A. S. (1991) The time course of phonological
encoding
in language production: phonological encoding inside a syllable. Journal
of Memory and Language 30, 69-89.
- Pierrehumbert, J. and R. Nair (1995) Word games and syllable
structure. Language and Speech 38 (1), 77-114.
- Treiman, R. and B. Kessler (1995) In defense of an onset-rime
syllable structure for English. Language and Speech 38
(2), 127-142.
Essay titles:
- What is the structure of syllables in English?
- What are syllables, and what is their internal structure?
- Who is right, Pierrehumbert and Nair or Treiman
and Kessler?