Contrastive sentence phonology

Abstract

Contrastive phonology has been preoccupied with the phoneme concept and the isolated word. The Contrastive Structure Series demonstrates this quite clearly. In Moulton's contrastive comparison of English and German sounds (Moulton, 1962), to take a representative example of the series and of contrastive phonological studies in general, 107 pages out of 145 deal with the consonant and vowel phonemes in English and German words and with their contrastive analysis. Only 31 pages treat stress (largely word stress), intonation and the inevitable juncture, which is the epitome of word phonemics in that it looks at the incidence of boundary signals at word and morpheme boundaries, e.g. antrat and das Kitzeln with strongly aspirated stops as against Landrat and die Skizze with weakly aspirated or unaspirated stops indicating different divisions between word final and initial consonants (p. 142). I would like to mention in passing that this opposition is artificially constructed in word material by a linguist on the basis of the equally artificial codification in Siebs (de Boor et al., 1969), where again hardly any tribute is paid to segmental sentence phonology (Kohler, 1970).