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Obligatory Contour Principle
The obligatory contour principle (frequently abbreviated OCP) is a hypothesis in autosegmental phonology that states that (certain) consecutive identical features are banned in underlying representations. The OCP is most frequently cited when discussing the tones of tonal languages (stating for example that the same morpheme may not have two underlying high tones), but it has also been applied to other aspects of phonology. The principle is part of the larger notion of ''horror aequi'', that language users generally avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures. Background considerations A commonly held conception within phonology is that no morpheme is allowed to contain two consecutive high tones. If two consecutive high tones appear within a single morpheme, then some rule must have applied . Maybe one of the surface high-tone vowels was underlyingly high-toned, while the other was underlyingly toneless. Then, since all vowels must have tone at the surface (in this hypoth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Autosegmental Phonology
Autosegmental phonology is a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a theory of phonological representation, autosegmental phonology developed a formal account of ideas that had been sketched in earlier work by several linguists, notably Bernard Bloch (1948), Charles Hockett (1955) and J. R. Firth (1948). According to such a view, phonological representations consist of more than one linear sequence of segments; each linear sequence constitutes a separate tier. The co-registration of elements (or ''autosegments'') on one tier with those on another is represented by association lines. There is a close relationship between analysis of segments into distinctive features and an autosegmental analysis; each feature in a language appears on exactly one tier. The working hypothesis of autosegmental analysis is that a large part of phonological generalizations can be interpreted a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Distinctive Feature
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonology, phonological structure that distinguishes one Phone (phonetics), sound from another within a language. For example, the feature [+Voice (phonetics), voice] ''distinguishes'' the two bilabial plosives: [p] and [b] (i.e., it makes the two plosives ''distinct'' from one another). There are many different ways of defining and arranging features into ''feature systems'': some deal with only one language while others are developed to apply to all languages. Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segment (linguistics), segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features, and place features. These feature categories in turn are further specified on the basis of the phonetics, phonetic properties of the segments in question. Since the inception of the phonological analysis of distinctive features in the 1950s, features traditionally have be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Underlying Representations
In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have been applied to it. In contrast, a surface representation is the phonetic representation of the word or sound. The concept of an underlying representation is central to generative grammar. If more phonological rules apply to the same underlying form, they can apply wholly independently of each other or in a feeding or counterbleeding order. The underlying representation of a morpheme is considered to be invariable across related forms (except in cases of suppletion), despite alternations among various allophones on the surface. Examples In many cases, the underlying form is simply the phonemic form. For example, in many varieties of American English, the phoneme in a word like ''wet'' can surface either as an unre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch (music), pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflection, inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation (linguistics), intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East Asia, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific islands, Pacific. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Morpheme
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, inside a word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as ''cat'' inside the word ''cats''), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes, may be added before or after the root, like the ''-s'' in ''cats'', which indicates plurality but is always bound to a root noun and is not regarded as a word on its own. However, in some languages, including English and Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European langua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Horror Aequi
, or avoidance of identity, is a linguistic principle that language users have psychological or physiological motives or limits on cognitive planning to avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures. The term originated in 1909 in Karl Brugmann, who used it to explain dissimilation, the tendency for similar consonants or vowels in a word to become less similar, which can often be chalked up to simply "euphony". Today, however, the term is usually applied instead to grammatical elements or structures. One of the most widely cited definitions is that of Günter Rohdenburg: "the ''horror aequi'' principle involves the widespread (and presumably universal) tendency to avoid the use of formally (near-)identical and (near-)adjacent (non-coordinate) grammatical elements or structures." In the study of phonology, such avoidance falls under the obligatory contour principle, which holds that certain consecutive identical sounds are not permitted (such as in Mandarin Chinese, wher ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Lexicon
A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or for words'. Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar, a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes). In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions, collocations and other phrasemes are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries are lists of the lexicon, in alphabetical order, of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included. Size and organization Items ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Phonological
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often preferred by the American Structuralists and reflecting the importance in structuralist work of phonemics in sense 1.": "phonematics ''n.'' 1. 'obsolete''An old synonym for phonemics (sense 2).") is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Derivation (linguistics)
Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as For example, ''unhappy'' and ''happiness'' derive from the root word ''happy.'' It is differentiated from inflection, which is the modification of a word to form different grammatical categories without changing its core meaning: ''determines'', ''determining'', and ''determined'' are from the root ''determine''. Derivational patterns Derivational morphology often involves the addition of a derivational suffix or other affix. Such an affix usually applies to words of one lexical category (part of speech) and changes them into words of another such category. For example, one effect of the English language, English derivational suffix ''-ly'' is to change an adjective into an adverb (''slow'' → ''slowly''). Here are examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes: * adjective-to-noun: ''-ness'' (''slow'' → ''slowness ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Moira Yip
Moira Yip (b. 1949) is a British-American linguist. Biography She earned her PhD in Linguistics in 1980 at MIT as a student of Morris Halle. She retired from her position as Professor of Linguistics at University College London (UCL) in 2009. While at UCL she also was co-director of the Centre for Human Communication and Pro-Provost for China. Before taking up the position at UCL in 1999, she was Professor of Linguistics and Acting Dean at the University of California-Irvine (1992-1999) and Associate Professor at Brandeis University (1982-1992). Moira Yip worked on a wide range of issues in theoretical phonology, and particularly on the phonology of Chinese. Her publications include papers on reduplication, morpho-phonology, prosodic phonology, and feature theory. Her frequently cited dissertation on the ''Tonal phonology of Chinese'' was published in the ''Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics'' series (Garland). In 2002 she published the first modern textbook on tone in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
David Odden
David Arnold Odden (; born 1954) is professor emeritus of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His contributions to linguistics have been in the area of phonology and language description, most notably African tone and the description of Bantu languages. In addition, his work on the obligatory contour principle (OCP) has been instrumental to an understanding of that phenomenon. He is the former editor of ''Studies in African Linguistics'' and a current editorial board member of ''Natural Language and Linguistic Theories''. Odden received his BA in linguistics from the University of Washington in 1975 and his PhD from University of Illinois in 1981. From 1981 to 1984 he taught at Washington State University, Michigan State University and Yale University before joining the faculty of Ohio State University in 1985. He was made a full professor there in 1999. Odden was also the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Durham in 2003 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
John McCarthy (linguist)
John Joseph McCarthy (born 1953) is an American linguist and the Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since July 2017. In July 2018, he assumed office as the Provost. McCarthy is best-known for his work on Optimality Theory in phonology: with Alan Prince, he devised Correspondence Theory and alignment constraints, although he has subsequently renounced the latter.McCarthy, John. OT Constraints are Categorical. ''Phonology'' 20 75--138. 2003 He has since written textbooks like '' Doing Optimality Theory: Applying Theory to Data''. Earlier in his career, McCarthy was responsible, along with Prince, for extending autosegmental phonology, and later Optimality Theory, to morphology, in particular to solve the problem of nonconcatenative morphology in Semitic languages. Career HHe completed his A.B. in linguistics and Near Eastern languages at Harvard College and obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1979. He was a professor a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
