About the course

Course outline and suggested readings

The following is an expected outline of the course and some suggested readings. You do not need to do the readings in advance, and there will be a more detailed bibliography in each lecture, but you may find them helpful either to get an idea of what the lecture is about, or to consolidate the material.

Session Topic Suggested reading
Monday The rise, fall and rise of contrast Chapters 4 and 5 of Dresher (2009), online here (paywall)
Tuesday Markedness: diagnostics and structure Rice (2007), online here (paywall), or Rice (2017), online here
Wednesday Contrast and underspecification Revisit chapter 5 of Dresher (2009)
Thursday Feature geometry and markedness Uffmann (2011), online here (paywall), in addition to chapter 5 of Dresher (2009)
Friday Markedness and substance Dresher (2014), online here
Dresher, B. Elan. 2009. The contrastive hierarchy in phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rice, Keren. 2007. Markedness in phonology. In Paul de Lacy (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of phonology, 79–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rice, Keren. 2017. Dependencies in phonology: Hierarchies and variation. In N. J. Enfield (ed.), Dependencies in language, 159–171. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Uffmann, Christian. 2011. The organization of distinctive features. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice (eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology, vol. 1, 643–668. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Dresher, B. Elan. 2014. The arch not the stones: Universal feature theory without universal features. (Ed.) Martin Krämer, Sandra Ronai & Peter Svenonius. Nordlyd 41(2). 165–181.

Course annotation

The topic of this course is how segmental representations can help understand phonological behaviour, and in particular the link between subsegmental structure and phonological activity.

The insight that the presence of phonological structure (such as a featural specification) and its activity has a long history in phonological theory. An influential early formalization of this idea was the theory of ‘markedness’ (understood quite literally as the presence of a ‘mark’) in Prague School phonology, where it was also linked to the idea that structure was built in the context of a language’s system of contrasts.

The idea boils down to three key elements:

  • Underspecification: phonological inactivity or ‘weakness’ follows from absence of structure

  • Markedness equals size: behaviours characteristic of ‘marked’ categories do not need to be stipulated if they simply derive from the presence (as opposed to absence) of phonological structure

  • Structure is downstream of contrast: phonological specifications are built only when necessary to make lexical distinctions (or for other pressing reasons)

In this course, we will consider how these ideas have been reflected in current phonological theory, what challenges have been presented to them, and how they could be answered.

The course is suitable for students with a basic grounding in phonological analysis within the generative tradition: if you know how to identify the underlying representations and posit some rules to account for a set of alternations, and how this process involves distinctive features, you should be good to go.