Title: WPP, No. 103: Phonetics and Phonology in the Last 50 Years
Abstract: UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, No. 103, 1-11 PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY IN THE LAST 50 YEARS Peter Ladefoged Dept. Linguistics, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA [email protected] [Paper presented at: From Sound to Sense: 50+ Years of Discoveries in Speech Communication, MIT, 11-13 June 2004.] ABSTRACT In the last 50 years there have been steady gains in phonetic knowledge and punctuated equilibrium in phononological theories. Phonetics and phonology meet most obviously in the definition of the set of features used to describe phonological processes. The Jakobsonian statement of distinctive feature theory in the 1952 caused a paradigm shift in the relations between phonetics and phonology. Changes occurred again with the introduction of a mentalist view of phonological features in the 1968 publication of The Sound Pattern of English. In1972 Stevens’ introduced Quantal theory and the hunt for acoustic invariance for phonological features was on. Autosegmental phonology and notions of a feature hierarchy brought further demands on phonetic knowledge. Now Optimality theory has proposed a new way of relating phonological contrasts and phonetic data,and Articulatory phonology has spurred great phonetic progress that is just beginning to have a direct impact on phonology.. FEATURAL BEGINNINGS It’s nice to be asked to present a historical survey of half a century of phonetics and phonology in this MIT meeting, because there was a clear cut change in the relations between these fields just over 50 years ago, and it was at MIT. In 1952 Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle published Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. It came out as a technical research report of the MIT Acoustics Laboratory and had a great impact on the field. This was a major new coming together of linguistics and speech engineering. There had been other publications concerning speech and acoustics, notably Potter et al, (1947) and Joos (1951). But these were primarily concerned with facts about the acoustics of speech. What was important about Jakobson et al (1952) was that its primary concern was linguistic theory. Jakobson had been propounding the notion of distinctive features for some time as had Trubetzkoy (1939). In Preliminaries to Speech Analysis linguistic theory was supported by advanced acoustic notions. Many MIT people are mentioned in the acknowledgements of Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, including a young scholar called Kenneth Stevens, who was just completing his doctorate. Interestingly, the second author of the report, Gunnar Fant, though five years senior to Ken Stevens, did not complete his doctorate till six years later, in 1958. A Swedish doctorate is a mighty thing. The ‘junior’ author, Morris Halle, had received his doctorate in 1951
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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