LINGUIST List 9.1608

Sat Nov 14 1998

Books: Phonology

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Rint Sybesma, Functional phonology, Paul Boersma

 New from Holland Academic Graphics:
 
 Functional phonology. 
 Formalizing the interactions between articulatory and perceptual drives
 
 by Paul Boersma
 
 In Functional phonology, Paul Boersma develops a theory that seeks to
 explain and describe the data of the languages of the world from
 general capabilities of human motor behaviour and perception. By
 separating the roles of the articulation and the audition of speech
 sounds, it predicts and clarifies generalizations about the organization
 of human speech, and solves several outstanding controversial
 phonological issues.
 Providing a synthesis between the "phonetic" and "phonological"
 standpoints, the theory of functional phonology expresses explanatory
 functional principles like the minimization of articulatory effort and
 the minimization of perceptual confusion directly in a descriptive formal
 grammar, and offers a typologically and empirically adequate
 alternative to generative theories of autosegmental phonology and
 feature geometry.
 The subjects covered in this book include articulation and
 perception models, constraint-based accounts of phonetic
 implementation, the acquisition of articulatory and perceptual
 phonological feature values, an algorithm for learning stochastic
 grammars, the construction of phoneme inventories, circular
 optimization in sound change, and a determination of the fundamental
 principles that underlie the surface phenomena sometimes ascribed to
 the primitive phonological operations of spreading and the Obligatory
 Contour Principle. 
 This book will appeal to phonologists interested in the possibility
 that the grammar directly reflects common principles of efficient and
 effective communication, to phoneticians interested in the idea that
 phonetic explanations can be expressed as constraint interactions in a
 formal grammar, and to any linguist interested in the innateness
 debate. 
 
 Contents: Introduction Part I. Representations 1. Representations and
 features 2. Articulation model 3. Acoustical simulation 4. Perception
 models 5. Test of the articulation model Part II. Constraints 6.
 Functional optimality theory 7. Articulatory constraints 8. Perceptual
 contrast and faithfulness 10. Acoustical faithfulness 11. Typology and
 the local-ranking hypothesis 12. Corespondence 13. Degrees of
 specification Part III. Grammar 14. Learning a production grammar 
 15. How we learn variation, optionality and probability 16. Inventories 
 17. Sound change 18. The Obligatory Contour Principle 19. Spreading 
 20. Conclusion
 
 1998. xii+494 pp. ISBN 90 5569 054 6. Paperback. [LOT International
 Series 11. IFOTT/University of Amsterdam dissertation.] Price for
 individuals ordering directly from HAG: NLG 66.00 (excl. P&P and
 VAT). 
 
 Holland Academic Graphics, The Hague <http://www.hagpub.com>;.

The following contributing LINGUIST publishers have made their backlists available on the World Wide Web:

1998 Contributors