A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology

Abstract

Phonology is the study of sound patterns of the world’s languages. In all spoken languages, we find sound patterns characterizing the composition of words and phrases. These patterns include overall properties of contrastive sound inventories (e.g. vowel inventories, consonant inventories, tone inventories), as well as patterns determining the distribution of sounds or contrastive features of sounds (stress, tone, length, voicing, place of articulation, etc.), and their variable realization in di¤erent contexts (alternations). A speaker’s implicit knowledge of these patterns is often evident in their extension to novel items and in experiments probing phonological well-formedness. This implicit knowledge – its content, formalization, and representation, – is the central focus of modern theoretical phonology, including generative phonology and many of its derivatives (natural phonology, government phonology, dependency phonology, optimality theory). However, just as important as speaker’s implicit knowledge of sound patterns are explanations for the distribution of sound patterns across attested spoken languages. Some sound patterns, are extremely common, while others are rare. Some examples of recurrent sound patterns involving segment/feature inventories, distribution, and alternations are listed in (1). The sound patterns in (1i, iii, iv, v, viii) are exceptionless across the world’s attested spoken languages, while those in (1ii, vi, vii, ix–xii) are recurrent and frequent. Exceptionlesss patterns like (1i) are sometimes regarded as ‘linguistic universals’ (1i), while common patterns like (1ii) are often viewed as ‘universal tendencies’.