phonology

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English

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WOTD – 21 February 2024

Etymology

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Fromphono-(prefixdenoting sound)+‎-logy(suffixdenoting a branch of learning, or a study of a particular subject).[1]

Pronunciation

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Noun

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phonology(countableanduncountable,pluralphonologies)(linguistics)

  1. (uncountable)Thestudyof thewaysoundsfunctioninlanguages,includingaccent,intonation,phonemes,stress,andsyllablestructure,and which sounds aredistinctiveunitswithin a language;(countable)the way sounds function within agivenlanguage; aphonologicalsystem.[from late 18th c.]
    Synonyms:orthoepy,(dated)soundlore
    • 1798August,Edmund Fry,Prospectus of a New Work, Entitled Pantographia;[...],[London]:[s.n.],→OCLC,title page:
      Prospectus of a new work, entitledPantographia:Containing accurate copies of all the known alphabets in the world. Together with an English explanation of the peculiar force of each letter: To which will be added specimens of all well-authenticated oral languages, Forming a comprehensive Digest ofphonology.
    • 1854March, “Notes of the Month”, in Sylvanus Urban[pseudonym],editor,The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review,volume XLI (New Series), London:John Bowyer Nichols and Sons,→OCLC,page281,column 2:
      The advantages of such a system [of a universal alphabet], both scientific and practical, were urged, the former in connection with the study of ethnology and philology, and the latter chiefly in connection with the great Protestant missionary enterprises of the present time. Professor[Karl Richard] Lepsiusand Dr.Max Müllerhave devoted much time to the subject, founding theirphonologyon the physiological principles ably expounded by Dr. Johannes Müller, and published in the Transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin.
    • 1856,J[ames] R[ichardson] Logan,“The Maruwi of the Baniak Islands”, in J. R. Logan, editor,The Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia,volume XLI (New Series), number 1, Singapore:[…][F]or the editor by Jacob Baptist,→OCLC,page16:
      The Achean, the ancient Malayu and other mixedphonologiespossessing a considerable degree of harshness, were thus formed.
    • 1879October,R[obert] H[olford] M[acdowall] Bosanquet,“XXXV. On the Present State of Experimental Acoustics, with Suggestions for the Arrangement of an Acoustic Laboratory, and a Sketch of Research.”, inRobert Kane,William Thomson, William Francis, editors,The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science,volume VIII (Fifth Series), number49,London:Taylor and Francis,[…];sold byLongmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer;[…],→OCLC,page301:
      The most interesting applications of the phonograph, however, are to the analysis of speech.[…][T]he point in which the proposed arrangements will be of most value is in the analysis of the inflections of speech, or the rapid variations of pitch which occur continually. This analysis is of the highest importance forphonology,as the inflections are undoubtedly among the principal characteristics of dialects.
    • 1997,Nikolaus Ritt, “Mutation, Variation and Selection in Phonological Evolution: A Sketch Based on the Case of Late Middle English a > au/_l{C/#}”, in Jacek Fisiak, editor,Studies in Middle English Linguistics(Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs;103), Berlin; New York, N.Y.:Mouton de Gruyter,→ISBN,page545:
      Crucially, the neat separateness ofphonologieswhich my account seems to imply is an abstraction and does not mean that thephonologiesrepresented different regional or social dialects.
    • 2000,Wallace L. Chafe,“The Ordering of Phonological Rules”, in Charles W. Kreidler, editor,Phonology: Critical Concepts,volume IV (From Rules to Constraints), London; New York, N.Y.:Routledge,→ISBN,page219:
      Thus, underlying 'agtus' was converted first into 'āgtus' by the vowel lengthening rule, and then into 'āktus' by the ancient persistent rule. This example has previously been interpreted as indicating that new rules can enter aphonologyelsewhere than at depth I.
  2. (by extension,uncountable)The study of the waycomponentsofsignsfunction in asign language,and which components are distinctive units within the language;(countable)the way components of signs function within a given sign language.
    • 1995,David F. Armstrong,William C[larence] Stokoe,Sherman E. Wilcox, “The Universe of Gesture”, inGesture and the Nature of Language,Cambridge, Cambridgeshire:Cambridge University Press,published1996,→ISBN,page21:
      Sign language linguists have produced many volumes of description of thephonologyand morphology of signs and the syntax of sign languages.
    • 1999,Rachel Sutton-Spence,Bencie Woll,“The Structure of Gestures and Signs”, inThe Linguistics of British Sign Language: An Introduction,Cambridge, Cambridgeshire:Cambridge University Press,published2003,→ISBN,page154:
      The term ‘phonology’ may seem odd in the context of sign linguistics, since the word has as its rootphon– the Greek word for ‘sound’.[…]However, sign linguists now prefer the termphonologyto emphasise that the same level of structure exists in sign language and spoken language, despite the differences in modality. The study of signphonologybegan with the work ofWilliam Stokoe,the American founder of sign linguistics.
    • 2014,Gerald P. Berent, “Sign Language–Spoken Language Bilingualism and the Derivation of Bimodally Mixed Sentences”, in Tej K. Bhatia, William C. Ritchie, editors,The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism(Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics), 2nd edition, Chichester, West Sussex:Wiley-Blackwell,→ISBN,part II (Neurological and Psychological Aspects of Bilingualism and Multilingualism),page352:
      [A]s with spoken languages, sign languagephonologiesare built from a repertoire of distinctive features that are assembled following principled combinatorial constraints.[…]ASL [American Sign Language] linguistic properties / a. Aphonologybased on hand shape, orientation of the hands, the location and movement of the hands within the signing space, and contact of the hands with each other and the body.

Hypernyms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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See also

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References

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  1. ^“phonology,n.”,inOED OnlinePaid subscription required⁠,Oxford:Oxford University Press,July 2023;“phonology,n.”,inLexico,Dictionary.com;Oxford University Press,2019–2022.

Further reading

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