My daughter is taking a linguistics class in college. She has to prepare a report on phonology. She asked me what phonology is. After looking at her textbook and then some websites, it confuses the hell out of me.
I kind of get an idea from watching a video related to the differences between phonetics and phonology, but I have to say, I still don’t really understand what phonology is.
Can anyone help? What is a good resource that explains this well?
An important part of traditional, pre-generative schools of phonology is studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes. For example, in English, the “p” sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [pʰ]) while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced [p]). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones, which cannot give origin to minimal pairs) of the same phonological category, that is of the phoneme /p/. (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated [pʰ] were interchanged with the unaspirated [p] in spot, native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as “the same” /p/.) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes. For example, in Thai, Bengali, and Quechua, there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration is the only contrasting feature (two words can have different meanings but with the only difference in pronunciation being that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated one).
Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for deciding whether two sounds should be assigned to the same phoneme. However, other considerations often need to be taken into account as well.
So it seems to me that a very important part of phonology (maybe the most important part) is the determination of what phonemes there are in a language. Would it be possible to even define phonology as the study and determination of phonemes in a language? (Probably not but it seems this is what all the resources focus on.)
In answer to my own question, Wikipedia states also the following:
Other topics
In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, or replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs, as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress, feature geometry, tone, and intonation.
Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in a given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of phonological rules, sometimes in a given order that can be feeding or bleeding,[16]) as well as prosody, the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation.
The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been applied to the analysis of sign languages (see Phonemes in sign languages), even though the sublexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds.
But it seems this whole idea of the determination and study of phonemes is the main aspect of phonology, and the above other topics seem secondary.
I would say determining phonemes is important, but basic. Determining phonotactics, phonological alternation, sandhi, especially across regional dialects, transmission and time gets increasingly more academic.
Would you say that the determination, study, etc. of phonemes forms the foundation of phonology? Is it fundamental to the other aspects of phonology?
If so, then I am kind of getting it. If not, and phonemes is but one of the aspects of phonology, then it’s just confusing as hell to me. I mean, what in the world are the following things (you don’t need to explain each one, just me expressing exasperation)?