8 - Phonological typology and naturalness

Summary

KEY TERMS

1. typology

2. crosslinguistic comparison markedness

3. functional explanation

PREVIEW

One of the main goals of many phonologists is explaining why certain phonological patterns are found in many languages, while other patterns are found in few or no languages. This chapter looks at phonological typology – the study of common versus uncommon, natural versus unnatural phonological rules, and looks at some of these commonly occurring phonological properties.

A widely invoked criterion in deciding between analyses of a language is whether the rules of one analysis are more natural, usually judged in terms of whether the rules occur more often across languages. As a prerequisite to explaining why some processes are common, uncommon, or even unattested, you need an idea of what these common patterns are, and providing this survey information is the domain of typology. While only a very small fraction of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world have been studied in a way that yields useful information for phonological typology, crosslinguistic studies have revealed many recurrent patterns, which form the basis for theorizing about the reason for these patterns.

Inventories

A comparative, typological approach is often employed in the study of phonological segment inventories. It has been observed that certain kinds of segments occur in very many languages, while others occur in only a few. This observation is embodied in the study of markedness, which is the idea that not all segments or sets of segments have equal status in phonological systems.