CHAT: THEORY/CHAT: RE: English Sound Structure

Dirk:
> On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, And Rosta wrote:
>
> > It's six years since I last taught more than phonemes-of-English phonology,
> > so I'm not up to date with recent textbooks. I can't remember what textbooks
> > I used, but I do remember that I was planning to use John Harris's _English
> > sound structure_,
>
> I think that Harris' book is a fine example of balancing
> theoretical concerns with real language data. It was a required
> text for a course I took from Mike Hammond on English Phonology
> (along with Giegerich's _English Phonology: An Introduction_ and
> Chomsky and Halle's _The Sound Pattern of English_; Mike's book
> was still in the scattered analyses stage). The theoretical
> orientation is generative, but uses Government Phonology rather
> than more familiar work based on distinctive features.
That reminds me: the other book I was going to use alongside Harris was
Giegerich's, mainly, iirc, for its treatment of stress.

I've always liked Government/Dependency/Particle Phonologies' use of
elements/particles rather than distinctive features: that is, every
primitive is independently pronounceable (and, moreover, according to
at least some, is defined acoustically rather than articulatorily -
Jakobson/Fant/Halle style). E.g. [+nasal] or 'N' is, unless combined
with some element that overrides its default properties, is [n]. Aspiration,
'h', is by default [h]. Occlusion by default is [?]. Etc. /t/ is made up of
coronality, occlusion, and noise. Lose the occlusion and noise and you get
just coronality: the American/Australian tap or NW England approximant R.
Lose just the noise and you get unaspirated [t], as in syllable codas. Lose
just the occlusion and you get Irish English spirant taps or Scouse
apicoalveolar fricatives. Lose coronality and noise and you get the glottal
stop. And so on.

ObConlang, though, Livagian phonology is very sniffy about phonetics, so
doesn't really bother with formal analysis below the segmental level.

--And.