phonological rules (summary)

[Angus Grieve-Smith]

I thought this message got sent yesterday, but my email program seems to 
be malfunctioning. I apologize if you get more than one copy.

I want to thank Fritz for raising this discussion, and Joan and everyone 
else for their great contributions to it.

This has meshed with some things I've been wondering about in phonology, 
teaching it to undergrads for the second time. In particular, I'm 
reading Sapir 1933, which essentially anticipates a cognitive approach 
by explicitly comparing the categorization of phonemes to categorization 
of physical objects like "clubs."

http://www.ucalgary.com/dflynn/files/dflynn/Sapir33.pdf

"To say that a given phoneme is not sufficiently defined in articulatory 
or acoustic terms but needs to be fitted into the total system of sound 
relations particular to the language is, at bottom, no more mysterious 
than to say that a club is not defined for us when it is said to be made 
of wood and to have such and such a shape and such and such dimensions. 
We must understand why a roughly similar object, not so different to the 
eye, is no club at all, and why a third object, very different of color 
and much longer and heavier than the first, is for all that very much of 
a club."

Another observation that fits in with Sapir's: my students are mostly 
speech pathology majors and very well-trained in basic phonetics. They 
can hear aspiration, flapping and sometimes nasalization because they've 
been trained to, but at the beginning of the semester they were 
completely incapable of hearing things in their own dialect of English 
and other familiar ones that were glaringly obvious to me, like 
affrication, glide-fronting and creaky voice.

I've been able to train most of them, but it was striking to see them at 
first transcribe [ʣæ̰ɾə] as [dʰæ̃ɾə]. The /d/ seems to have a definite 
psychological reality there. I'm interested in what you all think.

-- 
				-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
				grvsmth at panix.com