Phonological theories

In fact, we can do better than this, by making use of some further devices common in phonological theory. One is the principle of markedness which is a linguistic term for the concept of default. The idea is that given a binary or other distinction, one form of behaviour is normal, unremarkable and therefore unmarked, whereas the other form is noticeable, stands out and is therefore marked. In our example, we could say that the unmarked plural morpheme is simple /s/, but some special behaviour is invoked if this is added to a word that ends in a voiced consonant. Hence we would not need a rule for joining Isl to many words this would be the default rule that happens when any morphemes are joined (i.e. no changes occur). Hence we only need a rule for voiced cases, which would be ... 

We might well ask why it should be that 1st is chosen as the default rather than /z/ (note that we shouldn t be misguided by the spelling convention here) and this is in fact a prime concern in developing phonological theories, namely that we choose natural rules rather than simply ones that describe the date. 

Donegan, P. j., and Stampe, D. The study of natural phonology. In Current Approaches to Phonological Theory, D. Diimsen, Ed. Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 126-173. 

The field of metrieal phonology still survives today, but unfortunately bears little resemblance to the elegance and power of the original theory. 

Beyond this, we again find that there is httle agreement about how to describe pitch accents and boundary tones. Some theories state there are a fixed inventory of these, while some describe them with continuous parameters. The nature of pitch accents and boundary tones is disputed, with some theories describing them as tones or levels while others say their characteristic properly is pitch movement. One prominent theory states that we have an intonational phonology that parallels normal phonology, and as such we have inventories of contrasting units (sometimes called... 

A major claim of Pierrehumbert s thesis [351] was that more than one factor was responsible for the downdrift of FO contours. As with many other theories, she proposed that the phonetic declination effect exists, but also argued that the major contribution to the downdrift of utterances was downstep which was a phonological effect and therefore controllable by the speaker. Figure 9.8... 

Kaye, J., Lowenstamm, J., and Vergnaud, J. R. The internal structure of phonological elements A theory of charm and government. Phonology Yearbook 2 9%5), 305-328. 

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