MPhil in English and Applied Linguistics
English Phonology course outline (2007-2008)
2 Oct :
Class 1
Phoneme theory
- What is phonology? What does a phonological system imply? The relationship between abstract
phonological entities and phonetic realisations;
- The work of early phonologists in developing phoneme theory: ‘concrete’, ‘mentalist’ and ‘structuralist’
phonemes; the role of opposition and contrast in phoneme theory; the structuralist view and its
drawbacks;
- The phoneme in child language; Phoneme theory and applied linguistics; categorical perception.
9 Oct
Class 2
Phonemic systems
- How phonemic systems vary; universals; neutralisation, the archiphoneme
- Classifying English vowels and consonants; Vowel quality and length; Different theoretical accounts of
the English phonemic system; Abstract and phonetic specification
- Implications for accounts of accent diversification and sound change, implications for L2 learners.
16 Oct
Class 3
Structure in phonology
- Phonotactics; defining the syllable; sonority; loanwords and structural constraints; English consonants
and syllable structure; Cross-linguistic similarities and differences;
- Structure above the syllable: morphemes, words, phrases;
- Relevance for L2 learners; Segmentation in language processing.
23 Oct
Class 4
Phonological processes
- Citation forms and continuous speech, contextual variation, simplification; Domains and the
application of processes;
- Phonological processes: consonant assimilation, coarticulation, consonant weakening, vowel reduction,
elision of vowels and consonants, resyllabification;
- Relevance for foreign learners in production and comprehension; phonological processes and language
comprehension.
30 Oct
Class 5
Theoretical developments 1: Features and autosegments
- Beyond the phoneme: Why and how? Biuniqueness, invariance and linearity; Distinctive features,
redundancy matrices, naturalness and markedness, underlying and surface forms, rewrite rules;
- Beyond the feature: Nonlinear vs. linear approaches; Redundancy and underspecification;
- Implications for representations in language processing.
6 Nov
Class 6
Theoretical developments 2: Constraints
- Beyond rules: Universals and markedness, rules and exceptions, rule ordering, economy, arbitrariness,
variation;
- Abstractness of lexical representations and phonotactics in a constraint-based framework: underlying
and surface forms, Richness of the Base, Faithfulness, loanword adaptation;
- OT and language acquisition;
- Some current issues in phonology: Opacity, Phonetics vs. phonology.
13 Nov
Class 7
English prosody 1: Stress, accent, rhythm
- Phonetic correlates of suprasegmental phenomena; stressed and unstressed syllables; stress-shift; the
relation between lexical stress and accent
- Nonlinear representations of stress in metrical phonology, foot structure, light and heavy syllables,
quantity;
- Rhythm: rhythm classes; the phonetics and phonology of rhythm;
- Prosodic typology; the functions of stress, rhythm and prosodic grouping; the mapping between
segmental and suprasegmental structure; prosody and language processing.
MPhil in English and Applied Linguistics
20 Nov Class 8
English prosody 2: Intonation and its functions
- English intonation in the British tradition: Organisation into tone groups/contours, structure of the
tune, tune types, placement of tonic/focus and the nucleus;
- Tones and Autosegmental Theory, Autosegmental-Metrical accounts of intonation, AM in OT
- Intonation and meaning, linguistic and paralinguistic features, biological codes;
- Intonation and child language.
27 Nov Class 9a
Sounds and spelling in English
- The principles underlying English orthography; relations between phonemes and graphemes;
- Morpho-phonological and morpho-lexical relationships as represented in the orthography – a ‘mixed
system’ serving widely varying accents.
27 Nov Class 9b
L2 phonology and teaching English pronunciation
- Some issues in second language phonology;
- A brief guide to some basic principles of teaching pronunciation at different levels with different goals.