Advanced Phonology

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the speech sounds as physical entities (phonetics) and as linguistic units (phonology). In viewing sounds as physical elements, the focus is on articulatory description: How are speech sounds made$?$ What types of movements and configurations of the vocal tract are used to produce sounds in the world's languages$?$ In this part of the course, the goal is to learn to produce, transcribe, and describe in articulatory terms many of the sounds known to occur in human languages. In the next part of the course, the focus is on the sound patters present in the human languages. In particular, we will study the articulatory features that compose speech sounds, and phonological processes in terms of these features. A secondary and related goal of this course is to introduce students to the suprasegmental structure, and also to introduce students to the theory of phonology (How sound patterns can be represented and explained).