Introduction to Cognitive Science Linguistics component (17th October 2000, 11:40-12:30)

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Introduction to Cognitive ScienceLinguistics
component(17th October 2000, 1140-1230)

• Topic Phonology and Morphology
• Lecturer Dr Bodomo
• Department of Linguistics
• email abbodomo_at_hkusua.hku.hk

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Keywords

• morphology
• inflectional morphology
• derivational morphology
• morph
• morpheme
• morphophonology
• morphophoneme

• Phonology
• phonetics
• phone
• phoneme
• tone
• stress
• toneme
• tonology

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Introduction

• Theme
• A survey of how linguistic knowledge at the level
  of phonology and morphology is represented in the
  minds of speakers of a language.

• Objective
• an understanding of the basic terms and issues in
  phonology and morphology
• an interface approach rather than rigidly
  discussing these issues from phonology,
  morphology, syntax and semantics, we will look at
  how phonology interfaces with morphology and how
  syntax interfaces with semantics.

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Phonology

• A field of cognitive science that investigates
  how sound systems of a language are represented
  in the minds of speakers
• Stillings et al (1995220) gives a concise
  specification of what phonological knowledge as
  represented in the minds of speakers is
• The phonological component of a grammar consists
  of a list of the words of that language, with the
  pronunciation of each word given as a faithful
  acoustic image coupled with direct instructions
  to the vocal tract about how to produce that
  image, and instructions to the perceptual system
  about how to recognize it.

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Phonetics and Phonology a distinction

• Phonetics
• a science that deals with the articulatory and
  acoustic properties of sounds produced by the
  vocal tract

• Phonology
• how a set of the sounds produced by the vocal
  tract are organized into meaningful sound units
  in each language

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Phonetics and Phonology (cont.)

• IPA chart (please refer to your own copy)
• For instance, given a list of sounds that can be
  produced by the vocal tract, such as in the IPA
  chart (Phonetics), only a set of these sounds are
  meaningful in each of English, Cantonese and
  Dagaare (Phonology).

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Sets of meaningful sounds in English, Cantonese,
and Dagaare

• English vowels a, e, i, ?, o, u consonantsb,
  d, f, g, k, l, m, n, s, r, p, t, v, w, x, y, z

• Dagaare a, e, i, I, o, u, U, O, E, b, d, f, g,
  k, l, m, n, N, Nm, ny, s, r, p, t, v, w, y, z

These meaningful sound units are called phonemes.
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Phonemes

• Concrete sounds or phones give us the abstract
  concept phoneme a minimal meaningful sound unit
• basic units in phonology
• phoneme
• allophone
• phonemes in BROWN DOG as conceptualised/
  represented in the minds of speakers
• /b/ /r/ /au/ /n/ /d/ /O/ /g/ ? /braun dOg/

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Allophones

• Variants of a phoneme
• Examples
• English
• p and ph as in /stOp/ stop and /p?it/ pit
• Cantonese
• n and l as in /nei5/ and /lei5/ you
• Dagaare
• h and z as in /za?a?/ and /ha?a?/ yesterday

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Minimal pairs

• Method for identifying phonemes - analysing
  minimal pairs
• a minimal pair a pair of words that are
  identical except for a contrast in ONE sound .

• Examples in English, Cantonese, and Dagaare
• English
• /sip/? /s/, /tip/ ? /t/
• /pit/ ? /p/, /bit/ ? /b/
• Dagaare
• /la?ge?/ to enclose ? /l?/
• / ta?ge?/ to pull ? /t/

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Suprasegmental phonemes Tone and Stress

• Tone
• meaningful pitch variations on syllables

• Stress
• the amount of force used in pronouncing a syllable

Stress and Tone can indicate differences in
meaning among pairs of words
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Word stress in English

• Syllables may be stressed or unstressed in
  English, and some variations of stressed on
  syllables of a word may cause differences in
  meaning.
• Teachers in this course are going to ensure an
  'increase of marks for cognitive science
  students.
• Teachers in this course are so kind that they
  will in'crease your marks.

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Tone in Cantonese

• Cantonese TONES
• 6 tonemes
• high (tone 1), high rising (2), mid level (3),
  low falling (4), low rising (5), low level (6)

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Tone in Dagaare

• Two tonemes - high and low

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Phonological rules

• /Underlying phonological representations/
• Phonological rules
• Phonetic representation

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Phonological rules in English, Cantonese, and
Dagaare

• English
• /p/ ? ph /
• a stop is aspirated in word initial position.
• pit but phit

• Dagaare
• a /d/ becomes r in secondary syllable position
• dide but dire eating

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Morphology

• the field of cognitive science which studies how
  knowledge about the form or internal structure of
  words are represented and processed in the minds
  of speakers.
• divided into two main parts, inflectional
  morphology and derivational morphology
• Basic units of morphology morpheme, allomorph

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Morphemes

• A morpheme is minimal distinctive unit of grammar
  (Crystal 1997). A morpheme is an abstract term
  that must be captured by a concrete realization,
  the morph discrete speech unit e.g. brown
  dog
• In morphology we represent units with braces.
• Brown dog-s
• Free morpheme brown dog (these can stand on
  their own)
• Bound morpheme (-those that must be attached to
  another morpheme e.g. s)

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Morphology (cont.)

• inflectional morphology and derivational
  morphology.
• Inflectional morphology knowledge through which
  speakers of a language create several paradigms
  of the same word to express various grammatical
  categories like number, person, tense, aspect,
  case, and gender

Number in English paper paper-s dog
dog-z prize prize-iz
But also child child-ren foot
feet sheep sheep zero morph
The various plural variations are said to be
allomorphs of the same plural morpheme.
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Examples of inflectional morphemes (cont.)

• Person and number in French
• Je mang-e I eat
• Tu mang-es You eat
• Il mang-e He/she/it eat
• Nous mang-eons we eat
• Vous mang-ez You (pl) eat
• Ils mang-ent They eat

• Aspect in Cantonese
• maai5 buy maai5-zo2 has bought
• wan2 play wan2-gan2 is playing

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Derivational morphology

• Derivational morphology or word formation
  morphology on the other hand, is concerned with
  the speaker knowledge that underlies processes
  that form new words out of existing ones by
  adding various affixes, which are pieces of
  words.

• English Causative verbs from nouns and
  adjectives
• energy energ-ize
• sterile steril-ize
• penal penal-ize

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Examples of derivational morphemes (cont.)

• Cantonese
• zai2 (little/small) as in
• dang3 zai2 (small chair),
• syu1 zai2 (booklet)
• toei2 zai2 (small table)...

• Dagaare agentive nouns from verbs
• di to eat - di-raa eater some one who
  can eat a lot
• zo to run zo-raa runner, athlete
• yO roam yoOraa roamer, tourist

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Morphophonology

• While it is possible to talk of phonology and
  morphology independently, in reality, knowledge
  about these two areas are intertwined, and
  speakers process these as such.
• Sometimes, speakers represent knowledge about
  phonemes (meaningful sound units) based on
  knowledge about some grammatical environments.

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Morphophonologyor morphophonemics, as it is
known in North America

• the aspect of cognitive science that studies the
  classification of phonological aspects of
  knowledge representation based on knowledge about
  the grammatical aspects that affect these
  phonological representations and vice versa.
• Morphophoneme
• in parallel with a phoneme. While phonemes are
  written surrounded by slashes / /, morphophonemes
  are surrounded by braces . They are often
  written in CAPITALS (Crystal 1997).

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Morphophonemic example in English

• phonologically unpredictable singular plural
  alternation of words
• Knife knives
• Thief thieves
• But NOT of
• Chief chieves (chiefs)
• The morphophoneme F would then have
  morphoallophones like f for singular and v
  for plural of these words.
• Hence the need to emphasize their
  interrelationship.

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Other examples of morphophonological phenomena

• Word or lexical stress is a morphophonemic
  operation
• Example in describing the rules of
  pronunciation we often appeal to positions of the
  word in which the sound is
• aspiration in English a voiceless stop in word
  initial position is aspirated, elsewhere i.e. in
  word median and word final, it is unaspirated.
  This is not just a phonological rule but a
  morphophenemic rule.

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CONCLUSION

• Phonology and morphology are two salient aspects
  of the tacit knowledge of speakers of a language.
  It is at these levels of mental representations
  that speakers capture the sounds and structure of
  words and other minimal meaningful units of
  speech.
• An interface approach emphasizes that these two
  must not be separated into watertight
  compartments, but must recognize that there is an
  intimate interrelationship between them. This
  interrelationship is explored in the cognitive
  area of morphophonology.
• Morphology can also interface with syntax to give
  us morphosyntax. Syntax is going to be one of the
  topics of discussion in the next lecture.

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References

• Crystal, David. 1997. A Dictionary of Linguistics
  and Phonetics. Blackwell Publishers.
• Lepore, Ernest and Zenon Pylyshyn (eds). 1999.
  What Is Cognitive Science. Blackwell Publishers.
  (especially chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13).
• Stillings, Neil and others. 1995. Cognitive
  Science An Introduction. MIT Press. (especially
  chapters 6).
• Trask, R. L. 1993. A Dictionary of Grammatical
  Terms in Linguistics. Routledge.
• Wilson, R. and Frank C. Neil (eds) 1999. The MIT
  Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. MIT Press