Phonological Analysis : A Functional Approach

Human language is a remarkable phenomenon. Its study continues to be a source of fascination and delight. Dr. Donald Burquest, professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington, developed this foundational textbook during years of helping students overcome the feelings of dismay that new phonology students experience when confronted by a mass of raw phonetic data. While working through the material, the student is led through the steps of organizing data and is introduced to particular theories for later in-depth specialization.

In the second edition the author expanded on the first edition of this text by adding introductions to Autosegmental Phonology and Metrical Phonology. He has also included a series of problems at the end of most chapters that provide an opportunity for the student to apply the information in that chapter. This present edition incorporates numerous minor revisions and has an improved subject index.

This textbook is intended for use in an upper division introductory course in phonology, preparing the student to further study aspects of current theory.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Third Edition
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition

1. Preliminaries to Analysis
1.1 The place of phonology in linguistics
1.2 Foundational principles
1.3 Phonological features
1.4 Excursus on redundancy
1.5 Excursus on rule formalisms
2. Phonemic Analysis

2.1 Basic concepts in phonemic analysis
2.2 Procedures for phonemic analysis
2.3 The procedure applied
2.4 Phonological universals: Vowel and consonant systems
2.5 Identifying phonetically similar segments
2.6 Free variation
2.7 Phonotactics, neutralization, and underspecification
2.8 Problems

3. Morphophonemics

3.1 Phonologically conditioned alternations
3.2 Lexical alternations
3.3 Morphologically conditioned alternations
3.4 Phonological representation and rules
3.5 Analytical procedure and morphophonemics
3.6 Case studies
3.7 Positing underlying representations
3.8 Problems

4-6 Natural Phonological Processes

1. Conditioning by Surrounding Segments

4.1 Sources of natural processes
4.2 Assimilation
4.3 Dissimilation
4.4 Summary
4.5 Problems

2. Conditioning by Syllable Structure

5.1 Syllables and consonant strength
5.2 Syllable structure
5.3 Ambiguous segments
5.4 Ambiguous sequences
5.5 Processes conditioned by syllable structure
5.6 Length
5.7 Syllable-domain phenomena and processes
5.8 Problems

3. Conditioning by Larger Units

6.1 Word-level phenomena
6.2 Utterance-level phenomena
6.3 Problems

7-8 Three-Dimensional Models

1. Autosegmental Phonology

7.1 Introduction
7.2 The establishment of autosegmental tiers
7.3 Assimilation of one segment to another
7.4 Processes affecting the phonological word
7.5 Processes affecting larger units
7.6 Excursus on the feature tree
7.7 Problems

2. Metrical Phonology

8.1 Introduction
8.2 Syllable structure
8.3 Phonological feet
8.4 Phonological words
8.5 Extrametricality
8.6 Epenthesis
8.7 Interpretation of ambiguous segments
8.8 Reduplication
8.9 Problems

References
Index of Languages
Subject Index

Donald Burquest is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington and an International Linguistic Consultant with SIL International. He did fieldwork in Nigeria on the Ngas language and was involved in a language project completed in 1977. He received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from UCLA in 1973. He is also the coauthor of Phonological Studies in Four Languages of Maluku, A Survey of Linguistic Theories, 3rd edition , and numerous articles.