Introduction to Cognitive Science
Linguistics component
(17th October 2000, 11:40-12:30)
Topic: Phonology and Morphology
Lecturer: Dr Bodomo
Department of Linguistics
email: abbodomo@hkusua.hku.hk
Keywords
Phonology
 phonetics
 phone
 phoneme
 tone
 stress
 toneme
 tonology

morphology
 inflectional
morphology
 derivational
morphology
 morph
 morpheme
 morphophonology
 morphophoneme

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.
Phonology


A field of cognitive science that investigates how sound
systems of a language are represented in the minds of
speakers
Stillings et al (1995:220) 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.
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
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).
Sets of meaningful sounds in
English, Cantonese, and Dagaare

English: vowels: a, e, i, , o, u ; consonants:b, 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,
Nm,
y,
These meaningful sound units are called phonemes.
s, r, p, t, v, w, y,
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
dO:g/
Allophones
 Variants
of a phoneme
 Examples:
– English:

[p] and [ph] as in /stOp/ stop
ad /pit/ pit
– Cantonese:

[n] and [l] as in /nei5/ and /lei5/ you
– Dagaare:

[h] and [z] as in /zaa/ and /haa/
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/
Suprasegmental phonemes:
Tone and Stress
 Stress
– the amount of force
used in pronouncing
a syllable
 Tone
– meaningful pitch
variations on
syllables
Stress and Tone can indicate
differences in meaning among
pairs of words
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.
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)
Tone in Dagaare
 Two
tonemes - high and low
/nyu/ - to drink /u/
/nyu / - to smell /u/
Phonological rules
/Underlying phonological representations/
|
 Phonological rules
|
 [Phonetic representation]

Phonological rules in
English, Cantonese, and Dagaare
English
•/p/  [ph] / # —
•a stop is aspirated in word initial position.
•*pit but phit
Cantonese
•Final stops like /p/ /t/ /k/ are not pronounced.
•E.g.
Dagaare
•a /d/ becomes [r] in secondary syllable position:
•*dide but [dire] ‘eating’
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

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})

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.
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’
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 }
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’ – {zoraa} – ‘runner’,
‘athlete’
– {yO} ‘roam’ –
{yoOraa} ‘roamer’,
‘tourist’
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.

Morphophonology
or 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).
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.
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.
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.
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