Khari’s Reviews > Introductory Phonology > Status Update

We can stress grammatic words if we want. HE forgot the erasers, is just as grammatical a sentence as He FORGOT the erasers and He forgot the ERASERS. It's incredibly dumb to invent a new feature to differentiate 2 and 3 and then just kind of pretend that 1 doesn't exist. And nowhere else in the book have we built phonetic rules based on the intent of the meaning of something, it's always depended on the environment

Come to think of it, I think he's stepping out of his bounds a little bit by incorporating stress in at all. Stress, at least phrasal stress, isn't really in the field of phonology at all. It's more in the field of semantics or pragmatics. He's inventing an ad hoc feature called 'contrast' to talk about how we can stress different things in a sentence in English, but it's a dumb feature because we can stress anything

I think we must not have covered tones in my class 9 years ago. I'm looking at all these pitch contours and they are fascinating.

I taught rising and falling tones to my English classes in Japan, but realized I was doing it slightly wrong. It's not that English has rising and falling, it's that we have Low, Mid, and High, and depending on the order of those our voices go up or down in order to get to them.

Getting into the differences between, tone, intonation, and pitch. Finally had someone explain to me the difference between 橋、端、and 箸 in a way that I could understand! (They are all pronounced 'hashi' but the pitch pattern is different) Visual representations of what the voice is doing is extremely helpful. It's always been explained to me as 'stress' but it isn't stress, so yay, I thin I finally get it.

This chapter's 8 problems took me 11 pages to solve. But I feel like I understood what I was doing, so that was exciting.

I also looked at my notebook and discovered that I've filled more than half of it with my notes and problem solvings, so I can at least say that I went into this test having prepared for it. Maybe I won't pass, but I did put effort into it.

Dude. That's awesome. I'm so glad I live in this day and age, I can just go to youtube and start listening to poetry from all over the world in all different languages, it makes the linguistic way of showing things like stress so much easier to understand. I completely take back what I said in the prior status update. It is poetry. You can hear the rhythm.

Stress rules are easy to hear and difficult to write. So far I've seen how latin and persian stress their poetry. It's pretty, because there are patterns, but it doesn't sound like poetry to me. Probably because I don't speak those languages so it's hard to get the stress pattern right. I wonder if there are recordings online....

Today, more about syllables, and how some languages have alternating stress and to create a rule that covers that you need an iterative rule. It applies to itself, it's self-feeding, it creates the environment that allows it to exist.

You can also do things with parenthesis so if you had [+stress}/_((s)s) that would mean you could have three different patterns Sss if a three syllable word Ss if a two, and S if a one

Now we are on to syllables and stress! Yay! Stress rules are always interesting.

Stress applies to syllables, not to vowels. We know this because dipthongs have to be stressed together, you can't stress the second vowel unless they are not dipthongs but actually different syllables.

Some languages have phonemic stress, think English content vs content. Other languages have stress rules that just apply everywhere.

Further information about the interaction of phonological rules and syllables. Fortition is when a phoneme becomes stronger, usually at the onset of a syllable, lenition is when a phoneme becomes weaker, usually leading to deletion, usually at the coda of a syllable.

When a suffix that starts with vowel is added to a stem that ends in a consonant, the word will often resyllabify.