Linguist Forum
Specializations => Phonetics and Phonology => Topic started by: zaba on February 12, 2014, 03:52:40 AM
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I'm interested in developing my BA thesis topic. Obviously, there are many ways to perform an empirical phonetic study, but what is a good example from phonology? Just askin'! Thanks
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Virtually all phonology is empirical in the sense that it seeks to describe actual linguistic data. If you're looking for people to recommend favorites, there will always be a special place in my heart for John McCarthy's work with autosegmental templates in Arabic. Years ago when I read it, it was the first piece in phonology I read that made my jaw drop.
If you're asking for work that's very explicit about field methods, pickings are disappointingly slim. Your best bet is to look at the first-account grammars. If there's a language family in particular you're interested in, I can probably recommend a few things.
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Would studies into nasal/vowel harmony also count?
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Would studies into nasal/vowel harmony also count?
Most certainly. The Turkic and Uralic examples are probably the most widely described, but there are tons of languages with documented harmony systems.
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If you're into Optimality Theory you might be interested in pursuing vowel harmony operations in an OT framework. I came up with an OT description of vowel harmony in Finnish for a phonology class once, it was pretty interesting. There are lots of different takes on how harmonic systems are implemented within OT.