Phonological alphabets and the structure of the segment

Abstract

Like every living field, phonology is falling apart. Researchers are becoming increasingly specialized, and some phonologists have come to concentrate on particular subfields which they call their own – tonology, vowel harmony, intonation studies, metrical structure, the interface with morphology, or the internal structure of phonological segments. This concentration on subfields seems to have replaced the more traditional specialisation in terms of languages or language families. In addition, of course, the 1990s saw the advent of Optimality Theory (OT), which all but hid the differences between the various subfields under the blanket of a common notation, by focusing on the issue of how to do phonology rather than on what the primitives of phonology are. This does not mean, however, that these different subfields ceased to exist; as a matter of fact, OT seems to have benefitted certain subfields more than others. Given the centrality of the notion of constraint ranking, OT has proven most successful in domains in which there is some sort of inherent conflict. This may then be one of the reasons why issues concerning the interface between phonology and morphology (such as Prosodic Morphology) or with the interface between phonology and phonetics have been quite successful over the past decade. Considerably less effort has been invested in the study of, for instance, metrical structure, which seems more ‘purely’ phonological and less influenced by various counterbalancing factors. It is certainly possible to successfully analyze stress phenomena within OT, and various important approaches to these phenomena have appeared, but in many cases there does not seem to be much gain in doing so.