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.
This book scrutinizes recent work in phonological theory from the perspective of Chomskyan generative linguistics and argues that progress in the field depends on taking seriously the idea that phonology is best studied as a mental computational system derived from an innate base, phonological Universal Grammar. Two simple problems of phonological analysis provide a frame for a variety of topics throughout the book.
The articles collected in this volume provide an overview of the status of derivational theory within one of the most popular frameworks in present-day phonology, Optimality Theory. According to Anderson (1985), the history of phonology in the twentieth century can be seen as a sequence of periods in which the emphasis is on the structure of phonological representations, alternating with periods in which the emphasis is on phonological derivations.
This text contains a series of studies of phonological acquisition and development of children in specific contexts: linguistic context - Putonghua or Modern Standard Chinese; and developmental contexts - normally developing children, children with speech disorders, children with hearing impairment, and twins. This is a study of phonological development and impairment in Chinese-speaking children. It provides the normative data on this population, which should be of value to speech and language therapists and other professionals. It also advances the notion of "phonological saliency" which explains the cross-linguistic similarities and differences in children's phonological development.
The origins of this book lie in Lesley Milroy’s Observing and Analysing Natural Language (OANL) which first appeared in 1987. While the general orientation of that work has been maintained, and some of its material has been reproduced here, the tremendous expansion of the field has necessitatedthat the original work be substantially revised and updated for the current project. A good deal of new material has also been included to treat issues that have since emerged as significant (see, for example, the discussions of instrumental techniques for analyzing phonological variation (section 6.3.2) and the treatment of style-shifting as a strategic maneuver (section 8.3) ). The additional perspective provided by the co-author, Matthew Gordon, serves to distinguish further the current work from OANL. The basic structure of the book partly follows that of OANL. Chapter 1 offers a theoretical introduction to the general framework of variationist sociolinguistics, and is followed in chapters 2 and 3 by a discussion of study design and methods of data collection. Chapters 4 and 5 explore issues related to the social dimensions of language variation, and chapters 6 and 7 focus on linguistic issues, discussing various aspects of data analysis and interpretation related to phonological variation, and grammatical variation. Finally, style-switching and code-switching are examined in chapter 8.
