Phonetics & Phonology

Course content

Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the ways in which humans produce and hear speech. They thus represent the science of speech sounds and the theory behind phono-logical rules. Languages vary widely in their sound structures: their number and type of pho-nemes, the shape of syllable structure, use of tonal contrasts, stress patterns, and so on. At the same time, all languages show striking similarities in the way they structure their sound systems. Phonology strives to understand the structure behind these differences across dif-ferent speech systems. This seminar introduces the science of speech sounds and the theory behind phonological rules.

• How can we describe the pronunciation of a language?
• What do people do when they play language games?
• Why do loanwords sound so utterly differently from the way they sound in the donor language?
• How does the mind represent the phonological form of words?

We will revisit the concepts of phonetics and phonology that were introduced in the B2 module but focus on rules and theoretical models that go beyond the descriptions of surface phenom-ena. Topics include acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual phonetics, distinctive feature theory, tones, suprasegmental phenomena, word stress, phonology above the word, as well as differ-ent theoretical approaches to explaining and predicting underlying structures.