A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

366 phonostylistics
both of which reject the concept of the phoneme. In prosodic phonology, the
notions of phonematic unit and prosody are proposed. In early versions
of generative phonology, different levels of representation (such as the
systematic phonemic and the systematic phonetic) are recognized, and an
autonomous phonemic level rejected. The purpose of the phonological component
of a generative grammar is to take the output of the syntactic component
and interpret it phonetically, making reference only to the surface-structure
properties of the formatives involved. These surface-structure properties
include a specification of the segmental (vowel/consonant) structure of the
formatives (which comes from the lexicon), and a specification of the syntactic
features involved (which comes from the syntactic rules). The phonological
rules of the component apply to the segmental representation, using the
principle of the transformational cycle. At the end of this cycle, all the
brackets marking structure have been removed, stresses have been assigned,
and the resulting string of elements is represented as a set of phonetic segments
(defined in terms of distinctive features). The first book-length exposition
of generative phonology, and the standard model for the 1970–80 period, was
The Sound Pattern of English by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle (1968),
often referred to as SPE, and in this dictionary as ‘Chomsky and Halle’.
Later phonological theory has been much taken up with the question of how
far phonological rules can be explained in synchronic phonetic (typically,
articulatory) terms, and how far other constraints (e.g. of a syntactic,
morphological or historical kind) require explanations involving more abstract
notions. Earlier models of ‘abstract’ phonology, which presented solutions involving
underlying forms that are not realized on the phonetic surface, are thus
opposed to models which are more ‘concrete’ in character. Several alternatives to
traditional generative phonology have been proposed. For example, natural phonology
(NP) stresses the importance of natural processes – a set of universal,
obligatory, inviolable rules which govern the phonology of a language. They
are said to be ‘natural’ because they are phonetically plausible, in terms of the
properties of the vocal tract, as evidenced by their tendency to appear similarly
in a wide range of languages. Natural phonological processes are held to be
innate, and represent the constraints which a child has to follow when learning
a language. These constraints disallow the production of all but the simplest
pronunciation patterns in the first stages of development; they later have to be
modified or suppressed, as the child learns to produce more advanced forms. In
this approach, a distinction is drawn with ‘acquired’ rules, which are learned
and language-specific. See also articulatory phonology, atomic phonology,
autosegmental phonology, dependency phonology, loan, metrical
phonology, particle phonology, plane, prosodic phonology.
phonostylistics (n.)
see stylistics
phonotactics (n.) A term used in phonology to refer to the sequential
arrangements (or tactic behaviour) of phonological units which occur in a
language – what counts as a phonologically well-formed word. In English, for
example, consonant sequences such as /fs/ and /spm/ do not occur initially
in a word, and there are many restrictions on the possible consonant+vowel
combinations which may occur, e.g. /º/ occurs only after some short vowels /},